RADICAL PEACE

by

VIMALA THAKAR
Also published:

HIMALAYAN PEARLS, dialogues in Dalhousie 1987

and 1988

BEING and BECOMING, Dalhousie 1989

RADICAL PEACE

BY
VIMALA THAKAR

BOOKFUND V I M A L A T H A K A R
B L A R I C U M (HOLLAND)
Also published:

HIMALAYAN PEARLS, dialogues in Dalhousie 1987

and 1988

BEING and BECOMING, Dalhousie 1989

Chapter 1: Peace and Mutation page 5
Chapter 2: Life is consciousness page 17
Chapter 3: About the "Ego" page 28
Chapter 4: Answers to questions page 39
Chapter 5: The moving of thought page 52
Chapter 6: Answers to questions page 69
Chapter 7: Meditation page 83

Copyright: Vimala Thakar, Mount Abu, Rajasthan

India, 1990

ISBN Nr.: 90-72996-23-4.

4
1. P E A C E AND MUTATION

It's a strange world we are living in; full of

violence, of terrorism by individuals, by groups,
by states, flourishing of warindustry, and so on.
We are really in a mess; as a race or as a global
family we are in a chaos. This is the background
in which we have come together as serious-minded
enquirers to find out if it is possible to have a
peaceful world at all and what is the role of indi-
viduals in the creation of world peace or in building
up world peace. We are not politicians, we have not
come here as economists. We have come here as
human beings, members of the global human family,
inhabitants of the planet, as well as of the cosmos
who have the responsibility and privilege of sharing
the cosmos with many non-human species along with
the human species. It is a magnificent privilege
and a tremendous responsibility to live as a human
being.
If we look at the human history, at least of the
last 5000 years, we_^ might notice that the human
race as a whole naively believed in the efficacy
of violence and wars for resolving problems. The
race religiously believed that war can solve pro-
blems. Attitude of confrontation and defence me-
chanism of being always on the defensive, preparing
for the offensive, is a necessity of life. And in-
numerable wars have been fought; small battles,
conflicts, big wars they have been fought and the
world is simmering with violence today.
I wonder if you as an enquirer have noticed that
war has failed to resolve problems. Let us be very
clear about it. We resorted to wars, we accepted
the fate of training our own children to be slaught-
erers or to be slaughtered. We reconciled to the
cultural degradation of indulging in wars. In spite
of all that reconciliation the price that we have
paid in terms of human blood and human life, wars
have not helped us. So it is high time that we
apply our energies to find out, to explore an al-
ternative way of resolving human problems.

5
 Absence of actual war is not the content of peace.
Preparedness for wars on the earth and also the
starwars indicates a psychology of war-mongering
or violence-mongering.
We are going to question whether peace can be an
alternative way of resolving the problems. War
was a way; it was not only an event or an incident.
But the economies of the nations got geared to
war psychology; always prepared for the war in the
name of defence, the army, the navy, the airforce,
and we, the people of the world, paid taxes for
these armies to be kept, maintained, trained. We
sacrificed our facilities and amenities for the sake
of the armies of our country. I do not know about
the countries here, but I can share with you what
happens in the Third World countries in the East.
The people may starve, but the military gets the
best food, the best fruit, the best vegetables at
concession rates, while people might starve, they
might go hungry. Educational institutions suffer;
no money for the betterment of the educational
institutions, because the government needs to
prepare for a niKlear warfare, whether it is India,
Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Nepal. One speaks out of
personal experience. So, war is not an event, but
war is a psychology, it's an attitude to life, it's
an approach to human problems. And the citizens
become the fodder for the war industry in many a
way.
If that has really failed - war as a solution -, if
it has failed, if it has not created peace worth
the name, which would create an atmosphere of
mutual trust and respect, which would create a
psychology of belonging to one another and not
being always afraid of one another, what can we
do?
The realization that violence has failed is the
prerequisite of further exploration: violence at
international level, violence at national level,
violence at the level of institutions, organisations,
violence at the level of family and in so-called
individual life.

6
Do I realize, have I seen that violence in my
personal life also does not solve any problem? It
does not help me in any way: anger, hatred, jealou-
sy, aggressiveness, assertiveness. If you look to
the genesis of war and the source of violence, you
will find at the source all these things: the verbal
assertiveness, the psychological aggressiveness, the
distortions in relationships which are called jealousy
or anger or hatred.

Turning from the world scene to one's own daily

living, do we realize that violence is not the way?
If we have not realized that, then the enquiry
about world peace would be only an intellectual
exercise, an academic or a theoretical thing, be-
cause I have not seen the ghastliness of violence.
A glance can be as devastating as a bullet. A
bullet kills the body and a glance can destroy the
self-confidence and the trust of the individual. It
can crush the psyche; a word, a gesture, a glance.
As a religious enquirer, have we seen the futility
of violence?
The Third World countries get together and talk
about eliminating violence from international level.
I do hope that we see the significance of what is
being said. One is not talking about avoiding wars,
one is talking about the futility, the meaningless-
ness, the ghastliness, the moral degradation, the
imbalances that violence creates in our life. If the
history of 5000 years of violence, wars, bloodshed,
murdering, slaughtering, etc. has taught us a lesson,
then let us proceed, saying that this is irrelevant
to human existence; to hunan existence as a global
family, to a relationship of harmony with nature,
with cosmos, a relationship of harmony with non
human species and a relationship of harmony with
one another. Among the human species we are en-
quiring on behalf of the human race.
Let us turn to the expression "world peace". Peace
as a way of living in the world. We will turn to
the "psychic mutation" part of the theme later on.
But before we turn to that, let us tackle these

7
two words: "world peace". I wonder if we are
aware, that what is disturbing the people of all
the nations, all the countries throughout the world,
is the corruption that is torturing them on the
political level, economic level, administrative level.
We may visit any country, developing or developed,
totalitarian or democratic, theocratic states or
democratic states, we'll find that the people are
suffering because of corruption at high level. It
seems to me, the most disturbing thing in daily
living, which is not allowing any peace to the
people on the material and the psychological level,
on the intellectual level, is this phenomenon of
corruption. Can there be peace, if there is a
sanction for corruption? And if not, what is the
source of corruption? How do individuals get cor-
rupt and misuse or abuse the powers at their dis-
posal, the money at their disposal, the prestige,
the knowledge, so on and so on? It's no use bla-
ming individuals at the helm of affairs; the presi-
dents or the prime ministers of the countries.
We have to probe deeper.
Could it be that when the institution of state was
created as an agency to maintain law and order in
society, that we started as people. I am talking
about the people of the world; not referring to
countries, but to the people of the world, the
members of the global human family, because we
are that. And the earlier we learn to behave and
conduct ourselves as the members of the global
human family, the better for us. These petty little
exclusive loyalties to the idea of race, religion,
ideology, they have lost all relevance to the practi-
cal context of life. They are meaningless terms
today as far as our actual living is concerned, our
economical and political relationships are concerned.
They are dead idols, they are gods that have failed
us. We created this agency called "state" and in
order that this state can maintain law and order
in society, we started relegating powers to the
state. That institution that we created for our
convenience, for our security, for our welfare has

8
become so powerful that it is the state versus the
people everywhere in the world. The source of lack
of peace in the world, the source of corruption, the
source of much misery in the countries in the
world is the powers that the state as an institution
has centralized and captured. The state has the
economic power, the state has the political power,
the state has the military power, and the people,
whether in a welfare state or in a totalitarian
state, or whatever, they are helpless.
We do not notice our helplessness, because we get
so many amenities, facilities and securities. We do
not notice what we have lost. We created a party-
system and entered into electoral processes to send
our representatives to the legislatures to enact
laws. And the parties started imagining that they
are greater than the people; the state started
imagining that it is greater than the people; politi-
cal parties started imagining that they are greater
than the people. So they are not accountable and
answerable to the people at all. One is not talking
about the legal structure. You must be aware, as
the speaker is, how the judiciary has been losing
its independence and what is happening really all
around us.
It seems to me, that if we want to eliminate cor-
ruption from economic, political or administrative
life the world over, then we will have to probe
rather deeply and seriously this institution called
"state" and how many powers should be with the
states and which are the powers that should go
back to the people. It's a new responsibility that
the people of the world will have to shoulder: of
self-rule, of self-government. It's no use sending
appeals to the United Nations, Amnesties, Human
Rights iHstitutions and the courts of Justice. The
appeals, demonstrations, they fall on deaf ears.
When the Amnesty International people wanted to
visit India and go to Punjab to And out what was
happening, the democratic Indian government re-
fused them the permission. The government in
Lanka threw out the correspondents and the B.B.C.

9
people from Lanka.
You see, I can give you instances only from the
East, because I live there; I do not live in the
West, so I can't give you examples from European
life. It is the state versus the people and a radical
change in the relationship between the people and
the state has to take place if we are really serious
about world peace, because the people of the world
want peace. Unfortunately the governments cannot
comply to the demands of the p)eople. They have
created a network of economic and political relati-
onships around them so that they do not satisfy the
psychic demands of their own people. And the go-
vernments, that cannot comply to the demands for
peace, for exploitation-free economic society in
their own country, what are they going to do when
they meet together round the table in so-called
United Nations?
They will find out very skilfijl ways of postponing
confrontations, treaties. Postponement of confronta-
tion is not peace. Postponement of actual wars is
not peace. Peace has a different flavour all toge-
ther. It is the jjerfijme of your whole way of living.
It's not a result of a treaty, it's not born of
agreements and adjustments. See, that is how a
religious enquirer looks to the question. For us
it's a cultural question, for us it's a religious
challenge, a cultural challenge; for us it's not
only a political thing. Much of the chaos that is
existing today, is due to the distorted, twisted
relationship between the state and the people
which will have to be corrected. That's one part
of world peace, which those who are interested
might go into. We have not come to the stage when
the state will wither away. We have not come to
that stage, so it is going to be there, very much
so, but its ways will have to be corrected, its
powers might have to be curtailed and devolution
of power, power returning to the people as it
were. What will be the processes in European
countries and other Western countries is not a
theme to be taken up here. But one cannot ignore

10
this fundamental on basic issue, when one talks
about world peace. The fear of a nuclear war and
the possibility of total extinction of the human
race from the planet in case of a nuclear war, is
keeping the super-powers restrained.
Nobody thinks in terms of nuclear war any more.
Three years ago, four years ago, all of us were
very much scared. We were afraid of a nuclear
winter, we were afraid of total extinction of the
human race through a nuclear war, and so on. But
the circumstances have changed slightly better in
the last three or four years and then the talk of
ideology-free co-existence of super-powers and
other countries began. A coiple of years ago, I
think the intellectual atmosphere all over the
world heaved a sigh of relief.
We are now coming to the second point of world
peace, before we turn to the psychic mutation
occurring in the lives of individuals. Because, we
are not living in isolation. We are living very
much in the world and we are interconnected to
the world trade business, multi-nationals, drug-
maffias, terrorists. We are very much in the midst
of it, in the thick of it. So we have to be aware.
A religious enquirer cannot afford to be ignorant
and naive and say, that if you have trust in God,
you shall be saved. We have to undertake the
responsibility of becoming our own saviours. It
seems necessary that, as after the second world war
we set ourselves free of the imperialistic aspirations
and attitudes, now we have to set ourselves free
of the clutches of ideologies and ideological impjeri-
alisms, ideological empires. The second world war
has taught quite a lot to the human race and
colonialism and imperialism started receding.
The hang-overs might be there, perhaps in South
Africa or some other regions, but they are hang-
overs. They do not have the sanction of the world
any more. Now the time has come that in the name
of socialism, communism or any other "ism", in the
name of democracy, in the name of marxism, in the
name of any ideology, causing exploitation, causing

11
violence, is indecent. You may have an ideology
and you may follow it as a country. You cannot
prevent a country, if it wants to be an Islamic
country, a Jewish country, a Hindu country like
Nepal, it's their own private business. But the
ideological empires to be built, satellite countries
to be built around an ideology, - Easteren Europe
as satellite countries of Russia, America and her
satellite countries, - and then thie tensions between
them.... I think the time has come at the end of
this century, to see the criminality of imposing
ideologies upon one another and causing violence
in the name of ideology.
You saw what happened in China. They slaughtered
their own children in thousands; young boys and
girls between the age of fourteen and twenty-two
or twenty-three; thousands of them were slaught-
ered by the government in the name of an ideology.
It's not only stipidity, it's not only brutality, but
it's a psychological perversion. On the national
level the willingness to coexist with different
ideologies, with different approaches, has to be
mobilized as a social force. May I call it a global
force? Because billions of jjeople cannot be regi-
mented. Their emotions, their feelings, their senti-
ments cannot be standardized and you cannot whip
them into a particular code of conduct over a
century.
The second willingness is to see that there will be
different approaches to life, different ideologies.
If the human race sees the wisdom of sharing the
planet with different approaches, having a dialogue,
comparing notes, exchanging experiences and draw-
wing out a consensus of an approach to world-eco-
nomy and world political situation. You know,
before you can talk about one world government
or so, there will have to be in the next one or two
decades the rule of a consensus for economy, for
trade, business and political dealings. From confron-
tation to dialogue, from dialogue to co-operation,
respect for differences of approaches to economic,
to educational, to pxjlitical issues; willingness to co-

12
operate in the area of agreement and building up
a consensus in the areas of differences; this will
be the strategy of peace for the next coiple of
decades.

"Oh, we are only meditators, we are concerned

about meditation, spirituality. What has an enquirer
to do about all this?"
We cannot now indulge in a network of escapes,
personal or group escapes, in the name of religion
or spirituality. The act of living involves the
awareness of all these issues. As the coexistence
and sharing has to be free, has to be freed of
the perversions and distortions in the name of
ideologies, we'll have to learn to live together-
the different races. We are divided by different
races, there are the blacks, the whites, the yellows,
the reds, and so on. Like different flowers in the
garden there are different races, but this distinction
of a race need not become a division, a cultural
division. It need not become a psychological separa-
tion with the idea of siperiority or inferiority,
because the races will have to share the resources
of the planet, they will have to work together
and share the produce. Along with the freedom
from the clutches of ideology we'll have to set
ourselves free of the divisions and fragmentation
in the name of races.
Then we might contemplate and find out other
issues which disturb the human relationship, the
racial division, the ideological division, the nationa-
lity division, and so on. We can go on enumerating,
sitting in our own rooms and find out what is keep-
ing us away from peace as a way of living. Peace
is a way of living and a way of living implies
interrelationship. You and I are related, literally,
to the people in Africa, people in Vietnam, in
China, in Chili, Argentina, America. This complexity
due to science and technology that we have created
for ourselves as a context of life, is something
we cannot run away from. We can only eliminate
complications and enjoy the richness of the com-

13
 plexity. Today the wealth of complexity is not
enjoyed by us, because of the distortions and
perversions which create complications and create
an illusion as if the complexity itself was a pro-
blem. The complexity is going to remain.
So many races, cultures, langiiages, so many tempe-
raments inhabiting the globe. As there are topo-
graphical differences, climatic differences, there
will be temperamental differences. But the differen-
ce need not become a division, need not become a
point of discrimination and evaluation as superior
or inferior. Living together can take place, sharing
can take place when each one is aware that free-
dom, love and mutual trust are the requirements of
living together. If there is no respect and trust,
if there is no respect for the freedom of anodier
person, then I think we go back to the primitive
way of assertion, aggression, hatred, violence,
wars and wars; go on killing one another and live
as a schizophrenic human race, aspiring for peace,
preparing for war; aspiring for love and always
trying to defend oneself, being afraid of the other
person. These inner contradictions will have to be
resolved.
The behaviour of a person reflects the state of
consciousness. The word "consciousness" wille be
used here as a synonym for psyche. Psyche, not to
mean "the soul" in the ancient Greek language, but
we are going to use the word "psychic mutation"
to imply mutation in the consciousness, mutation
in the human consciousness; because we are talking
of world peace, we will be dealing with human
consciousness, mutation in human consciousness
and world peace. That will be our theme.
What is mutation? And what is the relationship of
the phenomenon, the event of mutation to the
mutant in which the mutation takes place? It's a
term used in biology; used also in physics. It's a
scientific term which we are going to extend to
human consciousness. Mutant and mutation. Mutant
is that in which the mutation takes place. Surely
mutation is not a change, a change that takes

14
place gradually in parts of an object or a being.
For example: you can change the way you dress.
It's a partial change in your relationship to the
clothing, to the clothes, the attire. You may change
the diet, your relationship to food. It may not cause
a total change. You may change the diet habits, you
may do asanas, pranayama and yoga practises; the
body will become more subtle, healthy, you might
feel more energetic, and if you have a good diet,
agreeable to the body, a natural diet, then maybe
the body is healthy. They are partial changes on
the physical level. They do not go very far; they
are changes on the fringes of your life. Let us go
deeper. You read books, you attend conferences,
participate in discussions, dialogues, seminars and
what have you and your verbal attire, the verbal
clothing changes, your diction changes.
Previously you talked about churches, temples,
you talked about God. Now you talk about transfor-
mation, mutation. The language changes, you talk
about meditation, you have new words. The gather-
ing of new words and new ideas might change your
verbal behaviour. Doesn't that happen? You study
Zen Buddhism and when you talk, even with your
friends informally, without your knowing the Zen
terminology becomes your way of expression. You
go to Theosophy, read their books, and without
your knowing the brain is flooded with those words
and your expression changes. So there can be a
verbal change. And also you can talk about ideas
that have been gathered. TTie words have a flavour;
they have an intoxicating effect; their meaning
vitalizes you temporarily by talking, by uttering
those words you feel as if you are living it. The
meaning is not yet a fact for you, but is an idea
that you have accepted. It may change, it may give
a polish to your personality, change your diction,
but yet it is not mutation.
What I am trying to say is: change can be partial,
change can be a slow process, it is not something
that happens suddenly and finishes itself. That
happening takes places nearly in the timeless

15
present. It happens in a fraction of a second but
it does not get stretched over a period of time.
No process, no gradualness, no steps, no efforts.
You can cultivate change in diet, in exercises, in
languages, etc. You can create codes of conduct
for yourself, you can follow techniques, methods
for cultivating experiences. That will bring about
change; occult experiences, transcendental experien-
ces. They may bring about changes, but change is
not mutation; experience is not mutation. Mutation
is something which takes place and occurs in spite
of you, irrespective of your efforts and unrelated
to chronological time. It's abrupt, it's sudden, it's
like an explosion of your whole being into a diffe-
rent dimension. It's like a quantum jump. We are
talking now about the mutation, the possibility of
mutation that is a wholistic, complete, qualitative
growth into another dimension.
What is the possibility of mutation taking place in
the individual psyche, so that one moves away from
fear and the urge of security to a sense of fulfil-
ment in relationship; from the habit of being on
the defensive to a new inclination towards sponta-
neous openness in relationship, and so on.

16
2. L I F E IS C O N S a O U S N E S S

It seems to me that hfe is awareness. It is an

energy of awareness permeating whatever exists. So
life is an existence self-generated, self-sustained,
self-aware. And this energy of awareness permeating
all the manifestations has the perfume of intelli-
gence.
It is this supreme intelligence, or energy of aware-
ness, that seems to have stimulated interrelatedness
and perfect orderliness in the cosmic life. We may
use the term 'consciousness' tentatively while men-
tioning the energy of intelligence. So life is consci-
ousness, the energy of consciousness, that energy
of consciousness, intelligence, awareness, operates
at various levels. At the mineral level it operates
in one way, at the level of water kingdom it func-
tions in a slightly different way and when it comes
to the birds, the plants, the animals, etc. the
consciousness operates still in a different way.
It manifests not only the symptoms of consciousness
or awareness, it begins to manifest the capacity
to react and respond to the surroundings intelli-
gently. We are not going to elaborate upon the cos-
mic dance of intelligence and its various shades
and nuances and the exquisite beauty and splendour
of the energy of intelligence by which we are sur-
rounded.
We are looking at the human psyche, exploring the
possibility of mutation so that the world may see
an alternative culture of peace, friendship and
brotherhood.
We the humans who have inherited the globe for
millions of years, have been working upon ourselves
with the help of this capacity of self-awareness,
with this capacity, this energy of consciousness.
It might have been that there was the urge for
physical security and mankind engaged herself in
the endeavour of securing the physical existence in
search of food, in search of health, in search of
group managements, tribal managements, so quite
a period of human evolution was spent in ensuring

17
physical security.
The second thing that has been noticeable in the
history of the human race, is the desire to attribute
some meaning to the dance of innumerable energies
that mankind found itself surrounded by: the suns,
the moons, the stars, the planets, the oceans, the
mountains. So the human brain struggled to attribu-
te some motivations behind the causeless existence
of life. The human beings did not create the cos-
mos, mankind has not created the existence, but it
found itself in the midst of a cosmos which had
preceded it with all its beauty, order, intelligence,
fertility of the earth, the rains, the forests, etc.
So motivated by the desire to find out the meaning
of existence it imagined that there must be a
creator behind, beneath, or within the creation,
because mankind looked vpon itself as builders,
constructors, creators of civilization.
If you build a house you are the builder and the
house is a building created by you, you are the
constructor and construction, so there must be a
creator behind the creation. To accept the cause-
lessness of cosmic life, to accept that it is self-
generated and self-sustained and orderliness is the
breath of intelligence, it wanted to analyse, catego-
rize, provide motivations, provide causes, create an
idea of sequence, and so on. The idea of a god or
a creator permeating the human consciousness at
the subconscious or unconscious level is some-
thing we have to look at very carefully and probe,
dig into it with a sense of great responsibility.
In the effort to find out the meaning man created
an authority. In an effort to understand the mea-
ning of existence, it constructed measurements by
which it could measure the infinity of life. The
only way mankind could relate to life was to
measure it, measure it by a word, measure it by a
yardstick of psychological time, measure it by
notes of music, measure it by numbers of arithme-
tic, measure it by the idea of space.
So the second authority of conceptual measurements
and symbols representing those conceptual measu-

18
rements, must have come about. We live more in
the world of concepts, measurements and symbols
than in the world of material objects which are a
necessity of our life, which we utilize, but psycho-
logically we have surrounded ourselves by the con-
cepts, the measurements, the symbols which have
their own utility and which might have enabled the
ancient human beings to feel that they are related
to the life around themselves.
The measuring gave an idea of relationship, con-
structing symbols to represent the measures gave
the illusion of a relationship and then man might
have felt, mankind might have felt, that it was not
lost in the infinity and eternity of cosmic life, but
it was related to it, it knew about it. A relationship
was built up through knowledge, through thought,
through ideas. The measurements, the symbols, the
concepts which were an aid to understand the
meaning of life, became an authority. As the idea
of a creator behind the creation became an authori-
ty, the measurements themselves became an authori-
ty. Our consciousness is cluttered by autiiority, as
it is today, within you and me. We, who are the
world, we who are the collective human race, con-
densed in a biological structure, we have the cons-
ciousness, the energy, not unconditioned as it is
in the cosmos, but a conditioned consciousness.
Civilization and culture condition the energies,
biological energies, glandular, muscular, neurological,
chemical and they built also a psychological
energy. Thought is an energy.
So it seems to me that the content of consciousness
today is a sense of authority, a variety of authori-
ties that have been built up through centuries and
we feel naked if we do not have a sense of autho-
rity as an enclosure around us.
Now depending upon the authorities built up by
ourselves collectively, organized authorities in the
name of religion, organized authorities in the name
of state, in the name of economic systems, in the
name of educational systems, and developing an
utter dependency upon these organized systems and

19
authorities, an uncanny sentiment which is called
fear seems to have been stimulated in the human
consciousness.
It is the acceptance of authority that stimulates
fear. Fear has no independent existence by itself.
So the second component of the human conscious-
ness today is fear, fear to look at life without
the help of ideas and thoughts, fear to look at
life or death without using measurements, symbols,
fear of one another without the help of defence
mechanisms which help us to manipulate the behavi-
our. So we are so fearful, afraid of life, afraid of
death, afraid of relationships, inhibited by the
fear we worship authority. It is a vicious circle,
authority and fear going together.
The urge for security or fear on the physical level
of the unknown is an understandable and reasonable
reflex built in our system.
But we are talking about psychological fear, fear
of relationship is a psychological fear, fear of
relating to the cosmic life without a sense of
authority is a psychological fear, fear of trusting
one another, the members of human species, it is
a psychological fear. So we are a fear-ridden race.
We aspire for peace, a peaceful harmonious co-
existence in the world, and we are afraid of diffe-
rences in approaches to life. We are afraid of
temperamental differences, we are afraid of biologi-
cal, psychological idiosyncrasies or freaks of nature,
and every difference is misunderstood for a division.
Every distinction is misinterpreted to be an evalua-
tion of superiority or inferiority, every disagreement
is misunderstood to be contradiction and opposition.
That is why, though the nations intellectually see
the inevitability of having world peace, they cannot
move towards peace as a way of living. They in-
dulge in making stopgap arrangements, patching up
conflicts, postponing crisis, building up farcical
agreements which are hollow from within. And the
human animals haunted by mutual distrust, mistrust
and fear are ever preparing to kill one another,
to exploit one another, to dominate over one an-

20
other 'before you dominate over me, I should domi-
nate over you', as an individual, as a nation, as a
tribe, as a group.
Inhibited by fear and worshipping in a clandestine
way, we want to have world peace. Do you see the
schizophrenic personality of global mankind? Do you
see the contradiction at the psychological level?
Knowledge has not helped to eliminate this primitive
fear and the fundamental urge to have some autho-
rity to protect us psychologically. We have had
many philisophies, theologies, organized religions,
we have had political ideologies, we have played
around with organized thought, which is an ideology
to enable us to live peaceMly and that has not
worked. Codes of conduct manoeuvered and imposed
in the name of religion, the self-denials, the
torturing of the bodies that has taken place in the
east, has also not helped. So what do we do?
This fear-cluttered and authority-cluttered consci-
ousness may do whatever it wants to do, newer
ideologies, disciplines, no disciplines, thought, or
running away from thought, indulgence in sensual
pleasure and cult of renunciation.
I think mankind has tried innumerable ways of
manipulating its brain and its body, manipulating
the collective structures from capitalism to commu-
nism, and Gandhi-ism, from Catholic religion to
Sartre and the existential essence cult, we have
tried everything.
So we are faced with the challenge of living on
this planet harmoniously, sharing life, not battling
all the time, sharing the planet in a decent humane
way, that's the challenge. The intellectual aspiration
is there, the intellectual cognizance is there that
peace is a must, otherwise the human race will fol-
low the path of collective self-extinction. That is
now clear to all the people.
The question is how does the human race grow into
the dimension of peace, harmonious relationships,
an alternative way, not the way of violence, but
an alternative way where violence would be absent,
this is the challenge. We have looked at the chal-

21
lenge externally in the first chapter, we are Icxjking
now from within, we are looking at the content
of consciousness and the nature of challenge there.
Even if the whole human race turned to Vedanta
and the Indian philosophy or Zen Buddhism, or the
Easterners turned to Islam or Christianity, the
problem is not going to be solved.
How do we tackle this crisis, the indecent life that
we are living today, the neurotic way of living,
harbouring distrust and mistrust of one another,
is the limit of indecency. How can we live together
on this planet, if inwardly I am afraid of you and
you have tremendous distrust about my motivations.
So we cannot be related to one another, living
requires the movement of relationship and the
addiction to authority and inhibition of fear do
not allow us to relate to one another individually
or collectively. So there is coexistence but no
sharing, there is coexistence but not togetherness,
there is coexistence but not a sense of belonging
to one another. And peace requires the sense of
belonging to one another, peace requires respect
for one another's freedom.
How do we go about it, where do we begin, indivi-
dually where do we begin? Acquisition of thoughts,
ideas and ideologies, and manipulation of our
behaviour according to those acquired ideas or
ideologies is not going to help us, whether we
acquire the ideas of ancient wise people or the
modern wise people and try to graft them on our
psyche.
Thought does not eliminate fear and thought cannot
give you security, it is an illusion of security,
thought is no protection and no security. We have
been harbouring that illusion for a criminally long
time. So shall we not begin by seeing the built-in
limitations of the process of thinking, the purpose
of thinking, the purpose of knowledge, the built-
in limitations of knowledge. Learning to use that
activity of thinking that is relating to the life
with the help of a word, relating to life with the
help of organized information on the physical level,

22
on the material level, in relation to man-made
structures, knowledge is a necessity and thinking
is a useful activity.
We are going to look at this phenomenon. But first
let us be very clear that the process of naming
and identifying, evaluating and measuring, that
the activity of codifying, analyzing and collec-
ting that information, storing it in memory, is a
useful activity which you cannot renounce. You
get into a car and drive miles and miles, kilometers
and kilometers, but the speed of the car, the utility
of the car cannot replace the momentum you have
in your body for walking, the capacity to walk. The
car has its own purpose to serve, but the magnifi-
cence of walking upon the earth, climbing, running,
the car cannot replace that; it's a mechanical thing,
a contrivance, very useful. But we won't say that
because we have cars and planes we won't walk.
The beauty of utilizing the physical body, all its
organs, all the capacities contained in the organs
is a part of living. That is a contrivance useful
for social life. So, knowledge is like the motorcar
or the spacecraft; it has a purpose to serve, but
it is a contrivance built up by us. It does not
create a relationship, please do see this.
Knowledge cannot create a relationship between life
and yourself. You know about life and you can
know about Alaska, or Costa Rica, Australia. Sitting
here, you can see the maps, you can see the videos,
but it does not mean you have walked upon the
land in Alaska. When you go there and walk upon
that land then you have a relationship. You climb
the Alps or N4ont Blanc and then there is the
personal relationship when you have that earth
beneath your feet and your head high in the skies,
enjoying the purity of the air and magnificence of
bright sunshine flooding the snow; it's poetry
there, it's life there, it's a living relationship.
Knowledge can never create a relationship and we
are trying to reach towards one another, individual-
ly and collectively, through knowledge, through
thought. We have an idea of a boy-friend or a girl-

23
 friend or a husband or a wife, an association of a
code of conduct attached to that: husbandhood or
wifehood, motherhood, fatherhood, statehood and
with the help of those associations we go on look-
ing at each other expecting the other person to
conform to that code of conduct, to that criteria,
to that idea and association of ideas and emotions
attached to the word.
See this whole business. The word, then the associ-
ation of ideas attached to the word, then associati-
on of emotions, sentiments attached to the word,
grafted upon the word, and we try to relate to one
another through all this conglomeration. We can
never reach each other, between us is the screen,
on one hand of fear and authority, and on the
other this distance that knowledg creates. So know-
ledge or thought, which was a help on the material
level, to reach from here to Warsaw or to Moscow
or to New York, you require the technology, the
science, the means of transport and communication,
which is all a creation of thought and a marvellous
one which has to be used.
So, utility at one sphere, at one level, and futility
at the other, relevance at one level and absolute
irrelevance at the other level. That is what, 1
think, we have missed as a race, the fundamental
wrong turn that might have taken racially, is exten-
ding the sense of fear to the psychological realm,
extending the sense of authority to the psychologi-
cal level and trying to bridge the distance created
by fear and authority with the help of thought and
knowledge.
As we read we are looking at the facts indicated
by the words, the reading has to be looking also,
looking and reading blended together in one total
action.
If we only read the words and do not exert our-
selves simultaneously and look at the facts, psycho-
logical facts indicated by the words, we'll be losers,
because the purpose of a dialogue, the purpose of
a verbal communication is to have a joint sculpture,
to have a joint voyage of discovery of the meaning

24
of life.
So reading is to be blended with looking, perception
to be blended with audition, reading the word and
look at the meaning inside, look at the fact inside.
Because it is our life, not the life of other people,
outside the hall, over somewhere far away from us.
The challenge of discovering an alternative way of
peace is a challenge for you and me.
So it seems necessary that we understand very
clearly the relevance of the movement of naming,
identifying, measuring, evaluating, which is called
the process of thinking and thought which is the
product of that process, its relevance and its built-
in limitations, so that we do not extend that to the
field where they have no relevance at all.
A word can indicate an object, locate it in space
and chronological time, it gives you information
about that.
Life is this gigantic wholeness, organistic wholeness,
it is the mystery of interrelatedness, it is the
dazzling, vibrating light of intelligence manifesting
in the form of a cosmic orderliness. It's not an
object located in space or chronological time which
a word could indicate.
A human being is not only an amalgamation of con-
ditionings, is not only a biological structure, but
there is an unpredictable energy inside the human
being. As the cosmic life defies all your logic and
mathematics, in the glory of its supreme intelligen-
ce, human beings, the condensed cosmosses, are
most unpredictable. They have a tremendous capaci-
ty for adaptability, they have a tremendous capacity
to understand and therefore move away from the
orbit of ignorance to the orbit of understanding.
The neuro-chemical changes that can take place
with a, frightening speed in a human being is some-
thing marvellous.
When we are with one another we are with the
same immeasurable, unnameable mystery of life as
we are when we are with the cosmos, the nature,
the selfgenerated existence by which we are sur-
rounded.

25
 To look upon a human being as an object to be
dominated upon, a creature to be possessed, to be
regulated, controlled, individually, in a family
situation or in a country by using the whip of
law or terror, shaped in the name of religion, or
politics or economics, all that is outdated.
The very direction of human civilization and culture
has to go through a radical revolution, it cannot
follow the same direction; if it has been going
north, it has to move perhaps east, or south or
west. The challenge is of changing the very directi-
on of civilization and culture, not doing some
patchwork here and there.
Fear and the urge for security and the addiction
to authority cannot be eliminated from the consci-
ousness with help of a new piece of knowledge, a
new code of conduct, new philosophies, new theo-
ries. What does this mean? It means, that the
movement of naming and identifying, integrating,
the whole panorama of mental activity, has no
relevance when we want to face the challenge.
To recognize, to realize that knowledge which has
been a great help for physical security, is perhaps
the greatest obstacle in tfie realm of psychological
relationships and peace is a question of relationship,
peace is not a problem of treaties between nations.
It's only a new dynamics of himan relationships
that might bring forth what you call world peace,
a new dimension and content to consciousness and
a new dynamics of relationship. They are inevitable
if we are really genuinely concerned to have world
peace. To arrive at this point of recognition of
the facts without a sense of frustration, without
a sense of depression, without a sense of helpless-
ness, seems to be necessary.
If the realization gives me a shock: 'O my goodness,
thought does not help! O my goodness knowledge
cannot help, what shall I do, what is left to a
human being?' If it gives a shock and ipsets the
equipoise within, learning requires an equipoise
within, learning requires a relaxation within. If
we get disturbed, frightened, because thought was

26
our only shelter, and the perception that it might
have to be left behind, we rush perhaps towards
an idea. You know, if we rush hastely towards
conclusions, then I think that our further investiga-
tion and explorations will be obstructed.
Let us be with this fact, the fact of the built-in
limitations of thought structure and its movement.
Let us be with the fact that fear cannot be elimi-
nated by an idea, by a theory. A relationship cannot
be built up by word, or thought or knowledge.
Let us be with this simple fact.
If we have seen, if we have taken the journey
together, then let us be with the fact. We should
feel that we are free of the burden of thought,
knowledge, memory. The perception of the fact
should awaken, really speaking, a sense of inner
freedom. So knowledge, and thought and thinking
have no relevance as far as mutation is concerned.

27
3. ABOUT T H E "EGO"

If you would graciously co-operate with me, we

shall take isp the issue how and why die myth of
an individual mind, the myth of the factual existen-
ce of the ego, the self or the me came into exis-
tence, has continued through centuries and has
poisoned our beings.
As there are individual expressions in nature, in
the form of trees or plants, or birds or animals,
we the human beings also have an animal body
evolved than other animals.
Perhaps having a different kind of majesty and
dignity as nature has enabled us to stand on our
two feet and employ our hands in a different way
than the other non human animals can do. The hu-
man society using the intelligence found out a
very beautiful way of honouring the distinctness of
each body, its qualities, its excellences, etc. So
the naming begins perhaps even prior to the birth
of the child and identification begins as soon as
the child is bom. We help the body to grow, watch
the change that takes place in its qualities. Having
been born in society the training, the conditioning
as a part of social life becomes an inevitable neces-
sity. So we train the body, eating properly, dres-
sing properly, moving around, exercizing the body.
We teach how to speak languages, fine arts. The
distinct body, named, identified, trained and condi-
tioned, develops what you call a personality.
Personality is built through a number of processes,
it's a manoeuvred thing, it's a cultivated thing and
it has a social utility. On the physical level, you,
the name, the qualities etc. have a factual content
and the personality has also a content. You are
born in Europe, you are brought up as a European,
conditioned in a European way. Somebody is bom
in America, brought up in the American way, so the
personality has an American polish, the language
has the American accent, intonation.
The personality, a cumulative result of different
processes, is something man-made. It has an aesthe-

28
tic content, a conceptual content, a verbal content,
an emotional content, which are quite different
from the factual content that the body has. You
must have watched people participating in a drama,
the actors, the actrices aslo in the films. When a
person plays the role of some character, plays as
if he or she is the character, for three hours,
nearly identifies psychologically to the character
and its excellences, idiosyncrasies etc. For that
time, it becomes extremely difficult for you to
distinguish the person who is playing the role, the
actor and the character. Eiut the actor is aware,
that he is playing a role for a few hours as a
means of his or her livelihood, as a pleasure of
gratifying the talents, as a means to obtain social
prestige. In the same way having been born in a
society you look upon yourself as a person having
a personality, being an individual, having your
human rights and responsibilities, duties towards
the family, the country, the world etc. It's a very
comprehensive cultural game that the human race
has been playing and perhaps will be playing as
long as it exists on the planet. You create a
society, you build up a state, an economic structure,
you set up an administrative structure, you build
up educational systems, enact laws and you obey
them. You go by your social code of conduct,
which you have created.
The personality, the individualness, the citizenship
of a society, membership of a community are all in
the conceptual world. They have no perceptual con-
tent and they have no perceptual entities or iden-
tities.
The body has a p)erceptual identity, it has a form,
it's an organism as complex as the cosmos, as if
the cosmic sipreme intelligence has become eloquent
in the human form. The intelligence manifested
motion when it became water, which manifested the
perceptive sensitivity, when it became birds and
animals.
It manifested the capacity of sight, the beautiful
eyes that the birds have, the animals have, the

29
perceptive sensitivity of the intelligence manifested
through the eyes. They got the sound and they
manifested the sensitivity of consciousness in a
rather eloquent way compared to the other species.
Receiving, responding, co-operating.
And when the supreme intelligence manifests itself
in the human form, it becomes eloquent, the mute-
ness disappears. The tremendous potential of the
inexhaustible intelligence manifests in the life of
human beings in innumerable ways.
So the human beings from tribalism proceeded to
have communities, societies, nations, states, interna-
tional relationships, world consciousness, global
awareness, ecological awareness, widening the hori-
zons of their perceptions and widening the horizons
of their responses. But all this has a conceptual
content. There is no personality or individuality
within the skin distinct from one another. The
bodies are distinct, they are separate, they seem
to enjoy independence of one another, but when it
comes to the inner realm of word, thought, con-
cepts, ideas, ideologies, theories etc., it has no
factual content at all distinct from one another.
Surely thought is matter and has a vibrational
existence within our body, but in content it is
global. It's a global human thought, a global human
mind expressing itself in various ways. The earth
is one organism, one being, but if you travel from
here to Switzerland the topography is different.
You travel northwards to Norway, Finland and the
climate is different. The whole texture of the
days and the nights, the rhythm of the cycles of
nature and seasons is different.
The variety of expression is the wealth of life.
The variety has no sense of being superior or
inferior. The variety cannot be evaluated as good
or bad; it just is as an expression of the complexity
of life. When the complex content of emptiness
explodes into the form of a cosmos, the wealtii of
its complexity manifests in the form of innumerable
varieties.
The biological structures are different, the physiog-

30
nomy is different, the bone structures are different,
the colour of the skin is different.
But when it comes to the activity inside, like the
breathing in and breathing out, is it not common
to the whole human race? You may cultivate prana-
yama and teach yourself deep breathing or inhaling
and exhaling the breath in a disciplined, organized
orderly way, but the breathing in and out is univer-
sal. We were born with it; it's not a conscious wil-
ful effort. The food is digested, the appetite, the
thirst. They are not conscious, voluntary movements
of the human mind; we were born with that. The
sex urge, the sex impuls is common to the human
race.
In the same way the movement of thinking is com-
mon to the whole human race.
The process of naming and identifying and compar-
ing and evaluating knowledge or organized infor-
mation came into existence and it got transmitted
through psychological, biological inheritance. It's
a movement that is going on withing you. So, when
you and I imagine that ' I ' am thinking, ' I ' am
feeling, ' I ' am reacting, maybe we are committing
a very gross mistake. We are not looking at the
fact correctly.
The eyes see a form, an object, a sensation reaches
the body, the contact of the sight to the object
stimulates a sensation. It is an electromagnetic
apparatus highly sensitive. Indescribably sensitive.
So the sensation here, getting converted into an
impulse and that stimulates the impressions we have
inherited of sounds, of pictures, neuro-chemical
substance, the result of experience of the parents,
the community, the country etc. All that is contai-
ned in the body, so it gets stimulated and an inter-
pretation takes place.
As soon as the impulse reaches the brain and the
interpretation takes place in the brain, there is
not even a split of a second for the I , the ego to
interpret it. It's not the ego that interprets consci-
ously, it's an involuntary cerebral movement, neuro-
chemical movement that takes place within you and

31
you attribute it to an imganinary entity, the I,
the self, the ego. It's a play-back of the inheri-
tance, it's a play-back of what you have learned,
absorbed and assimilated since childhood and has
been added unto your inheritance, grafted upon the
inheritance as it were.
When we say ' I think' it's really the movement of
the past in us, the movement of memory in us, the
movement of what has been imprinted on the bio-
logical structure by conditioning it through centu-
ries. The region that you are born in, the communi-
ty that you are born in, the type of society that
you are born in may have various designs of
expression. An Indian expression would be different,
an European expression would be different, the
Chinese would still be different. The expression in
words, the intonation, the accent, the gesticulation
they will be different, but the content is the same.
There is nothing like an ' I ' separate from the mo-
vement of die inheritance and the assimilated
conditionings of this life. It is an expression
through this body, a particular body, expression
has a particularity, but not an individuality.
You know, when you build up those machines or
gadgets, in a factory you may have thousands of
them, models, and you buy one of them. It is a
particular of the collective, collectively produced
and a particular sample, a particular model.
In the same way diere may be particular expressi-
ons, regionally conditioned, as the plants, the
fruits, the vegetables are conditioned by the region,
by the topography, by the climate. These expressi-
ons, which you call the emotional expressions, the
neurological expressions will be conditioned by the
region, the community, the particularity of the
race etc., but the content is tfie same: the anger,
the jealousy, the bitterness, the tenderness of
care, affection, the pettiness, the generosity.
It's the global human mind expressing through you
or me. It's the global human conditioning which is
expressing itself through you and me, the biological
structure, the vehicle of the total human past.

32
The body is the vehicle that carries the total
human past within itself imprinted right on the
marrow of the bones, the blood and other systems
in the body.
What I am trying to say is, there doesn't seem to
be anything like an individual mind. It is this
presumption that there is an individual mind, which
leads to the urge of security, which gets inhibited
by fear, which creates authority and therefore dog-
mas, sex, exclusive loyalties to races, religions,
nations etc. It leads to comparison, competition,
aggression and therefore is a way of war, a way
of violence.
Are we willing to face this unpleasant truth, that
though physically and socially speaking we are
individuals or persons, on the conceptual level
there is no individuality at all. There is nothing
like your ego and my ego; these are words. The
word ' I ' and 'you', the 'me' and the 'not-me' be-
come necessary on the physical level to say ' I
feel hungry'. You don't say the body needs food
and therefore it must be fed. You say ' I feel
hungry' and you take a meal. The word ' I ' is to
be used there, as you have to use the activity of
naming and identifying to live on the material level.
You have to use speech and language in order to
live in society. You have to go through the educati-
onal system and use your talents, become an engi-
neer or a doctor or a businessman to function in
the social structure. They are all artificially cultiva-
ted things and structures as a part of the social
life; that's all.
It is like a person becoming an actor playing a
role of a character. Apart from the game I may
play the role of Hamlet, but as soon as that en-
actment of the role is over, I may play Othello,
Desdemona or whatever. But as soon as that is
over, when I get home I don't go to bed as an
Othello or a Desdemona. The identification is over;
it had a specific purpose for a limited time and I
played it.
In the same way the roles that we have to play in

33
life: the sex urge, the psychological necessity
that I feel for having a companion leads me towards
motherhood or fatherhood. I become the father, the
mother, the husband, the wife. It's a role that
one is playing having its own responsibilities, its
beauty, its elegance, its way of living. I become
a Dutchman an Englishman, an Indian, a Swiss, be-
cause I was bom there. So I pay the taxes and
have an Indian passport or an English passport. It
has a specific purpose and a very limited relevance.
It cannot be equated with the wholeness of my life.
It's a minor part of my whole life, because I am
related not only to the society that human beings
have created, not only to the structures that man
has built up, I am related to the cosmos, the whole
existence. You may be born in the Hague or Am-
sterdam, but you say I was born in Holland, don't
you say that? You were born in Zurich and perhaps
in a small apartment somewhere, or a hospital, but
you say you were bom in Switzerland.
In the same way you are bom really in the coanos.
Born of it, born in it and you are going to live
in it. All the nations, the societies, the religions
that man has built up, within the cosmos, they are
not outside the cosmos. The ultimate responsibi-
lity is to live harmoniously with that cosmic life
by which we are surrounded. These are small enclo-
sures that we have built up as the birds have
nests and human beings have their homes. Collecti-
vely they have societies and they play the game
of being nations and states and what have you,
but it is within the cosmos.
If there is no harmonious relationship with the
cosmic energy, with the Cosmic Intelligence, if
there is no harmonious relationship with the earth,
the suns, the moons, the skies, the oceans, then
you get what you call ecological problems. But
you get complications on the psychic level, the
desire to dominate, the desire to be aggressive,
the desire to kill, all the crookedness leading to
violence is a maladjustment with the cosmic energy.
The root cause of this collective maladjustment

34
and individual imbalances seems to be acceptance
of the authority of the concept of ' I ' , being an
individual within the skin, having a solid entity
which has to be preserved, which must be continu-
ed. Its continuity is equated with the act of living
and the discontinuity of its movement is considered
to be death or dying. It is somediing rather serious.
As the body has to be preserved physically against
the storms and the torrential rains and the heat of
hot summers and so on, we feel that there is an
entity inside, which has to be preserved. So as you
have armies, militia outside, you must have a de-
fence mechanism inside. You must train and cultiva-
te certain patterns of behaviour and teach the
children all those codes of conduct and patterns
of behaviour, so that they can face life.
Everyone talks about the necessity of new man for
creating a new world, a new psychology for world
peace, a new dimension of consciousness for having
love and compassion as a way of living; everybody
talks about it.
And we are not there yet at the end of the twen-
tieth century, because for creating a new man we
imagine that the I, the ego must be trained in a
different way, a new discipline, a new ideology,
and that ' I ' , which is the prodiKt of the past,
will become new. First presume it, wanted it to
continue and then insist that it is that I , the me,
the ego, which is going to be transformed through
yoga, tantra, mantra, satori. It is going to get
transformed through mental movement. Please do
see this!
And I beg to submit that the movement of ' I ' as
knowing and acquiring, changing patterns of behavi-
our has no relevance whatsoever to mutation; simply
because the ' I ' , the 'me', the 'ego' is a concept,
it has no identity, there is a global htman mind,
but the individual mind is a myth.
And we are afraid of that myth being exploded in
our daily living. So we might read books, attend
gatherings, talk about meditations, transformations,
but in our daily living we are very vigilant that

35
the likes and dislikes of the ' I ' are cared for.
We are very careful that the values and the theo-
ries of the I, the me are retained and sustained.
Not playing the role or the character of a member
of society or a citizen of a country, but we identify
ourselves and want to live as Indians, Hindus, Ca-
tholics, and aspire for world peace. Identify not
only with a distinction, but a difference, an attitude
of superiority, inferiority, evaluation, exclusive
loyalty.
Distinctions are not the bondage, but the exclusive
loyalties and identifications are the real culprit.
After having seen that it is only a concept, we still
want to continue with the identification and then
wonder why doesn't mutation takes place. We un-
derstand when logically pointed out step by step
that it has a conceptual content and not a factual
content. It is not an entity, it has no identity
except for the particularity of expression, conditio-
ned by the body and the region in which the body
was born.
After having seen all diis, in my daily living I do
worship my likes and dislikes. I get hurt, I get
annoyed, I am ambitious. Acknowledging intellectual-
ly that it's an untruth, in the so-called daily living,
I want to continue that.
And intelligence implies that once you understand
what is true and what is false, the identification
with the false is ended completely, not partially,
but totally. You cannot have 50% false and 50%
truth. Life is an organic wholeness, it's non-frag-
mentable, it's indivisible. You cannot say this is
practical life and this is spiritual life, this is
material life and that is religious life. You cannot
divide life. Life is an 'istness'.
So psychic mutation requires the honesty and die
integrity, that once we investigate and we perceive
what is truth and what is false, the false is not
allowed to continue in our life at any cost.
Then in spite of holding a passport of a country,
dressing the way the people in your country dress,
having the food that the country has traditionally.

36
and the body is used to it, your mind does not
function, identifies with the conditionings as a
British person, as an Indian person, as a Swiss
person. It functions as a human being.
So it seems to me, that the mutation might require,
that the consciousness is purged of all identificati-
ons, unconditionally purged of the sense of identifi-
cation with every manner of conditioning. It is
emptied of the sense of identification. You cannot
empty the conditionings, they are imprinted on
youi- whole being. You are an expression of that
conditioning: a Hindu mind, an Indian body, a
Chinese body, a Japanese mind. They cannot be
destroyed, they need not to be destroyed; they
have a role to play in society.
But the sense of identification and exclusive loyalty
to the conditionings, may I say addiction to the
conditionings, has to end, so that there is an inner
space which you call silence.
If the consciousness is filled with identifications^
addictions, attachments, no movement can take
place there. There is no space for anything to hap-
pen, there is passivity, there is benumbedness and
shrinking of the awareness. So in order that the
mutation occurs in the body, the brain, the myth
of an individual mind or ego has to be exploded.
It can explode only with the help of words, intel-
lectual investigation and personal observation of the
functioning of the mind. If the observation does
not take place while the mental movement is going
on, if one does not sit down and observe, then
listening to talks and reading of books will lead
us nowhere, because there won't be a personal
perception of the facts as they are.
Understanding takes place when there is a personal
intimate encounter with tfie fact, the perception
and being with the fact. That's why one has to
learn to put oneself first in the state of non-doing
and die state of observation, a reaction-free
perception, a reaction-free cognition. One has to
give time and be with oneself in the state of non-
doing, non-exp)eriencing, non-knowing.

37
 When the non-knowing, non-experiencing, non-
doing is there, then the state of observation
emerges or rather blossoms like a bud blossoming
into a flower. You don't have to observe, but the
state of observation as a reaction-free perception
takes place when there is no desire to sit down
for acquiring new knowledge, or some experience;
there is no waiting for something to happen to you.
But you, in a total relaxation, let go every volunta-
ry movement and enjoy the grace of non-motion,
non-action, non-verbalization.
When the identification with the theory of an
individual mind, an individual self or ego comes to
an end, there is the space which is called silence.
There is a wholistic relaxation; the physical, the
verbal and the psychological. An organic wholeness
to that relaxation.
I am using this term wholistic relaxation, because
it happens with most of us that the body relaxes,
but the mind is working furiously. So it's a partial
and compartmental relaxation. TTiat relaxation does
not help, because outwardly you are stretching
yourself on the ground, and inwardly you are keep-
ing the neuro-chemical system very tense. You are
thinking, you are worrying, you are brooding, you
are comparing yourself with others, you are going
to a depression that transformation has not taken
place.
Inwardly there is the tenseness of the whole ner-
vous system. It's necessary, that a wholistic organic
relaxation takes place and the basic identification
with the theory of the ' I ' seems to me to be the
root cause of all assertion, aggression, violence
and therefore wars in the world.
A consciousness without any exclusive loyalties
will have the receptivity and openness to be related
to the cosmic wholeness, to the organic wholeness
of life, to the beingness of life. And maybe in
that communion of a center-free consciousness and
the supreme intelligence permeating the cosmos,
mutation or a wholistic transformation occurs
spontaneously and timelessly.

38
4. ANSWERS T O QUESTIONS

One of the questioners writes that aggression or

violence is naturel to the human race, therefore
peace or world peace seems to be just an Utopia.
One presumes that the term 'natural' is used to
indicate 'instinctive', instinctiveness of violence in
human nature. Though one would like to go into the
issue of what is human nature. Is it something
static or has it got any pliability and flexibility,
has it been changing through the evolution of
human culture and civilization, science and techno-
logy, literature, philosophy, systems of education?
Has it been changing, growing more mature, or is
it something that is absolutely static, incapable
of qualitative changes?
It seems to me that there is an instinctive fear
incorporated in the human brains and neuro-chemi-
cal systems, by the way of living that mankind
followed from century to century. This instinctive
fear or the urge for continuity of the physical
organism has provoked the inclination to assert, to
own, to possess, to dominate, stimulating the terms
like victory and defeat, rulers and ruled, etc. What
is 'instinctive' cannot be termed 'natural'.
If the human race had looked upon the instinctive
desire for assertion and aggression as something
natural, that is desirable, natural therefore to be
protected, natural therefore to be glorified, if the
himan race had looked upon the assertion and ag-
gression as desirable, natural, glorify able, we would
not have proceeded from tribal life to the creation
of a society. We would not have proceeded to
create a rule of law in sociey and educate the
members of society to understand the laws, the
rules, the regulations. We wouldn't have educated
the members of society in the principles of econo-
mic structures, administrative set-ups, inform them
and enable them to adjust their behaviour to the
principle of economic and political structures. We
would have said: aggression or violence is natural,
so let us fight.

39
There have been efforts to curb the aggressive
tendencies, to restrain the aggressive inclinations,
to find out alternative ways than waging wars and
battles for the resolution of social-economic or
political clashes, challenges, problems. If you read
the human history we find a conscious, organized
effort towards restraining, curbing, controlling
this assertive, aggressive, violent tendency. Look
at the direction in which the human race has been
moving collectively. It has not succeeded in spite
of having made efforts through twenty centuries,
because there seemed to be some loop-holes, some
contradictions that require to be resolved, some
shortcomings which will have to be eliminated. But
the direction of human civilization is not from
violence to more violence, but from violence to-
wards less violence, towards absence of violence,
towards peace.
The direction of the racial movement does not say
that the human race is satisfied with the instinctive
violence contained in themselves. Why hasn't the
human race succeeded in eliminating the violent
tendency, even in being able to restrain it to a
great extent?
It seems that we lacked a comprehensive, wholistic
approach to life. After having created society,
having built up economic and political systems I
think we stumbled when we created the theory of
a nation state and national sovereignty. We grew
out of tribalism in a way but on the other hand
we built up sophisticated tribalism in the name of
nation states and national sovereignties.
Naturally a sovereign state requires a national
economy. As an individual has self-centered ambiti-
ons, self-centered way of behaviour, the nations
developed self-centered, diat is nation-centered
economies and political structures, political systems.
If you and I as self-centered human beings always
preocci^jied with the anxiety to preserve the entity
of the self, the me, preoccupied with the effort
to gratify every wish of the self, every ambition
of the self, there are clashes amongst us. Everyone

40
wants to dominate, everyone wants to own, to pos-
sess, everyone yields to jealousy, to suspicion
and human relationships become invisible battle-
fields, where battles are waged through glances,
through words, through abstaining from words,
through indifference, callousness and families suffer
from cold wars and hot peace. Isn't that our daily
experience? So coexistence of self-centered entities
wanting to relate on their own terms lead to tensi-
ons, conflicts and clashes.
In the same way on one hand you create science
and technology, means of communication and trans-
portation that travel nearly as fast as the speed
of the light now, and on the other hand you want
to have self-centered entities with the idea of
their own sovereignties.
Then the economies clash, the economic interest of
sovereign states clash, their desire for economic
expansion, ideological expansion stimulates clashes,
tensions. Then you create, you build up a United
Nations where the sovereign states send their
representatives, not the representatives of the
people, but the representatives of the states. The
states, sending their representatives to argue, to
bargain and to go to back to their government to
tell that their interest has been preserved at the
cost of someone else.
I think the aspiration for peace, the aspiration
for love, compassion as a way of living, the aspira-
tion for liberty, fraternity and equality was not
coordinated with the existence of sovereign nation
states.
Either we have to set ourselves free of the theory
of nation states and the idea of sovereignty of the
states or we have to say that world peace is not
possible. World peace requires a world economy, a
global approach to political issues.
Secondly, the aggressiveness, the tendency for
violence has been condemned by religion, spirituali-
ty. The so-called organized, institutionalized religi-
ons have been talking about turning the other
cheek, talking about the non-violence of the Buddha

41
 and Mahavira and so on. They have been talking
about it in individual life.
On the other hand these organized religions,
preachers of spirituality, propounders of human
ethics, etc. never bothered to correlate their talk
about non-violence, F>eace or love with the economic
relationship which is the content of our daily living
from morning till night.
The economic structure that we have created after
the industrial revolution is a structure yielding to
exploitation by the producer of the consumer, maybe
not in one's own nation, but where we find mar-
kets. The governments of the nation states became
trading companies and therefore the main concern
of the national economy is finding out markets
for the production that goes on very quick, very
fast, due to nuclear technology. You go on produ-
cing and you want markets, therefore controlling
markets. That becomes a competition, a new compe-
tition. Then you form power blocks, political and
economic power blocks and the competition, the
comparison, the tensions go on.
Either the economy will have to take the shape of
a global economy, sharing the resources and distri-
buting the products on the basis of equality, free-
dom, etc., or there is going to be absence of peace,
there is going to be tension, there will be battles
fought on the economic level. There is no blood-
shed, but there is something worse than bloodshed
in these economic battles. Do see with me that
peace is a wholistic way of living. You cannot
fragment life and say we will talk about peace and
love and compassion in religious gatherings, chur-
ches, temples, mosques and in relation to economics,
production, profit-making, marketing, nothing to do
with love, compassion, freedom, friendship, etc.
It will have its own ethics. That's what the inter-
national economic maffia is doing today.
I wonder if you have noticed the 7-page letter
written by Gorbatsjov to the heads of the seven
West European heads of the states who met in
Paris where he talked about not bilateral and

42
regional coordination between creditors and debtors,
but a multinational coordination between the East
and West and a new relationship to evolve between
those who give the loan and those who take the
loan.
World peace requires a new approach to economic
relationship, to the ownership of resources, to the
ownership of means and instruments of production,
not in one country but on the global level.
If you go on developing science and technology
you have to look to the psychological structure
and see that it does not remain rigid, dedicated
to worn out ideas of the past centuries.
If the psychological structure remains tethered to
out-of-date, worn out ideologies we shall have lost
the relevance to the context of the twentieth or
twenty-first century. Obviously there cannot be
peace.
Peace shall remain an Utopia as long as it is not
looked at as a whole way of living and is looked
at as an issue of treaties and agreements between
governments. It's a whole wholistic new way of
living involving the total population of the globe.
Not something to play around, by the governments;
it's not a festival of the governments. It is some-
thing where the lives of the people, the psychology
of the people gets involved, the instinctive aggres-
siveness has not been sanctioned and glorified.
There has been an emphatic, cooperative effort
among the human races to curb it, to restrain it.
They tried to restrain it through religion but the
organized and institutinalized religions forgot their
purpose and went astray. They talked about hells
and heavens and rewards and punishments and gods
and goddesses. Instead of persuading the people to
bring the heavens down to the earth, they encoura-
ged the fears of punishment and the temptation for
rewards. So the whole ethics got vitiated.
Instead of religions helping the hunan relationships
and the living on the earth to become more peace-
f i i , it created a privileged class running away
from daily life in the name of religion and renunci-

43
ation and becoming a parasitical class, because
you become religious you don't have to work. You
can retire to monasteries, to temples, to mosques.
So, religion could not help.

We thought we could help to curb and restrain

through education, but the educational systems
were geared to the needs of the nation states and
they started training human beings to fit in the
economic and political structures that the govern-
ments were building up. That became a new kind
of bondage. That dit not help.
Peace has remained an Utopia though a distinct
aspiration of the collective human family, because
there have been loopholes which will have to be
filled. The aspiration for peace having a bearing
upon economic structures, upon political set-ups,
administrative set-ups, educational systems and so
on.
When diere is that correlation and coordinated
efforts then peace need not remain an Utopia.
Instead of emphasizing the aggressiveness, asserti-
veness, if the children in families and schools are
helped to emphasize the aspiration for friendship,
sharing, cooperation, then they will not grow up
with the psychology of confrontation, they will
grow up with the psychology of friendship and
cooperation.
Today the whole education throws us back on a
defensive attitude in relationship, beware: somebo-
dy might cheat you, psychologically, somebody might
deceive you. So you have your own defense-mecha-
nism. Psychological relationship is like a battle-
field. You know, a kind of fear that is stimulated
and the child is always asked to compare, to
compete, to be on its guard.
If the educational systems introduce the children
to the mechanism of mind, to the whole movement
of thought and help the children to explore the
myth of an individual mind, then perhaps peace
shall not remain an Utopia.

44
Another questioner has aslced: 'What is there more
to peace tiian non-war?'
Why not observe our own life? Is there peace in
your life only when you are not fighting with
someone else, quarreling with someone else? The
absence of verbal quarrel, psychological clash,
does it constitute peace in your life? Has peace
any positive and constructive content as far as
your daily living is concerned?
It seems to me that peace is related to the aware-
ness of what is the aim, the objective, the purpose
of life. As long as living is a means to an end and
not an end in itself and by itself, there cannot be
peace in the life of an individual.
Going to a school or an university is a means to
acquire a degree, a diploma. That is a means for
acquiring a job. A job is a means to acquire money.
Money is a means to purchase social security and
so on and so on. We are not concerned with living,
the quality expressed in the movement of our
relationship with nature, with ourselves, with fellow
non-iiuman species, with fellow hunan beings and
so on. The quality, the essence of life is neglected
completely and living becomes only a chain-acquisi-
tive process, like chain-smoking, it's chain-acqui-
ring. Go on acquiring; acquire, own, possess, protect
and die in the end feeling content that you had
acquired so much and you had so much wealth and
you are leaving behind so much property. Do you
see? Living becomes a means to an end. Not for the
joy of it, not because life is something sacred.
Life is for living. The purpose of life cannot be
outside living. The act of living cannot be a means
to an end, to please some god or goddess, to acqui-
re money, prestige, security, etc. But the act of
living is the worship of the divine. It is the only
way one can express gratitude, gratefulness to the
cosmic life of which one is born and in which one
is living and moving.
It seems to me that there cannot be peace; you may
be a decent hunan being and you have cultivated
the art of controlling your emotions, therefore

45
you don't have quarrels, clashes, battles with other
human beings, but controlling, curbing, restraining
is not enough.
Peace requires a different perspective of life, it
requires purification of perception. Life not as a
means to an end, but life as an end in itself. Life
itself is divine. Life is divinity. It is something
sacred. And reverence for life is the perfume of
religiosity. There is no other religion, but reverence
for life that is self-generated and self-sustained.
There cannot be peace unless there is this radically
qualitatively different perspective of life and
therefore a different approach to life and a diffe-
rent attitude to hunan issues, challenges, problems.
Peace is not only non-war or non-aggression. It is
moving from a fragmentary partial or compartmental
perspective of life to a wholistic perspective of
life. It is moving from the dimension of psychology
of confrontation to psychology of cooperation.

Questioner has asked: 'You use those terms die ' I ' ,
the 'me', the 'ego'. What is their relationship to
one another and what is their meaning?'
When one uses the term ' I ' , one is referring to the
content of consciousness where there is a sense of
'I-ness', that is to say, a sense of being separate
from the rest of life. So the 'I-ness' in conscious-
ness refers to the feeling of separateness from the
rest of life. When you look at that separateness as
an identity you call it the 'me'. From the 'I-ness'
in the consciousness you coin a term 'me' and the
'not-me'.
Based on the 'I-ness' as a feeling of separateness
an identity is imagined and in daily parlance for
verbal communication you use the term 'me'. You
have provided a sense of identity now to the quali-
ty of 'I-ness'. It was a quality and here is a sense
of identity to it. The separateness, the feeling of
separateness has been given a sanction as it were,
when you say this is 'me' that is 'not-me'. When
that identity by using the terms in the movement
of relationship hundred times a day, you imagine

46
that the identity of the 'me' has some factual
content. First it was a feeling, a quality, then a
sense of identity which has a continuity. The
feeling may have continuity, may not have continui-
ty, but when you call it as something having an
identity it has a continuity in your imagination.
That sense of continuity crystallizes and you
imagine that there is an entity; as you physical
body is an entity, there is an inner entity which
is called the 'ego'. When you are communicating
you use the word the ' I ' , the 'me', the 'ego' to
mean the same thing. But if you are asking me to
thrash them out, the nuances, the shades, there is
a difference.
First it begins with the sense of 'I-ness', develops
into a sense of identity and continuity, then it gets
crystallized and becomes a rigid entity which we
call the 'ego'. I hope this clarifies the different
nuances in which the term are generally used in
the communications by me.

Now we are turning to something that is neither

related to world peace nor psychic mutation. It's
a surprising question and rather a serious question:
'There is a Krishnamurti Foundation in Holland and
there is your organization in Holland. They work
separately'. And then the questioner proceeds: 'Are
you a living continuation of J. Krishnamurti?' Maybe
the questioner has never attended our gatherings
previously. Maybe the questioner does not know who
J. Krishnamurti was. Or maybe the questioner knew
him, has attended Vimala's gatherings, but then
why the question? It's something which is rather
baffling.
The human race throws up spiritual radicals time
and again. Jesus, the Christ, in whose name Christi-
anity as a religion and the Christian church were
built up after he was gone, was a spiritual radical,
whom his contemporaries could not understand.
Gautama the Buddha in the East was such a radical,
whom the contemporary Brahmanistic culture in
India could not comprehend. And it seems to us

47
that J. Krishnamurti was a spiritual radical of the
twentieth century whom both the traditional spiritu-
alists and the traditional scientists could not com-
prehend. They might have had glimpses here and
there.
Such radical cannot have what you call continuati-
on. Radicals never found sects, they do not have
dogma's. They share their perceptions, they share
their understandings, and the matter ends there.
They don't require followers and disciples. Do you
think the twelve apostles were foUowrs of Christ?
Or the so-called twelve persons around Buddha,
who built up Buddhism were followers of Buddha?
All his life he had said: 'Be a light unto yourself.
Do not create any authority out of me and do not
be tempted to institutionalize my teachings.' That
was two thousand five hundred years ago.
You have the world over today a very complicated
structure of Buddhism: Mahay ana, Hinayana and a
branch in the name of Zen-Buddhism. Do you think
that is continuation of Buddha? Or Christianity a
continuation of the teachings of Christ?
Revolutionaries do not have a continuity biological
or psychological. The perfume of their life lingers
for centuries. It does not fade away. The light
emanating from their beings does not get swallowed
up by any darkness. Do you call that perfime
continuation? Do you call that lingering light
continuation?
J. Krishnamurti had no disciples, no followers and
your friend Vimala has had no masters and no
gurus. Do you see the relationship between us? I
have been a student of his teachings and I have
learnt a lot. Not only from the teachings but from
the presence. Not from the personality, but the
presence. From die light that he was.
The foundations exist because they are running
schools in America, in England, in India. They
have provided retreats for serious inquirers to
understand the non-authoritarian approach to
inquiry. And the foundations may print books and
sell them. It's all on the periphery, so there cannot

48
be a question of continuation; today of Krishnamur-
ti and perhaps tomorrow of Vimala. There will never
be a question of continuation.
Groups might play the tapes, the videos, study
groups might discuss, read the books, have exchan-
ges. That's what the inquirers have been doing
through centuries and that is the path, to begin
with verbal inquiry, intellectual exercise, cerebral
explorations, leading to their own termination and
helping the inquirer to grow into the maturity of
silence or meditation. In meditation there is no
path, no question of continuity.
If this aspect of meeting the question is sufficiently
clear may I request you to accompany me and look
at the question from a slightly different angle?
As the human beings seem to have the impulses of
appetite, thirst, sleep, sex and have instincts of
fear and therefore instinctive tendencies for securi-
ty and protection, hasn't tliere been an aspiration
in each human heart, right from the beginning of
written human history for love, for companionship,
for compassion? Hasn't there been an aspiration to
understand what life is, the aspiration to learn,
to uncover the mystery of life, discover the mean-
ing of life?
When such an aspiration for discovering the mean-
ing of life and uncovering the mystery of relati-
onship, which is living, permeating the human
hearts gets condensed as it were in some individual,
gets focused in one human person, that human per-
son inquires, investigates, explores in the laborato-
ry of his or her own life on behalf of the whole
human race.
Some of you might recollect what J. Krishnamurti
had said in 1929, when he dissolved 'The Star in
the East', as he was die head of die organisation.
He said: ' I would like to set the human being
unconditionally free'.
The aspiration for freedom, the aspiration for
political freedom and economic freedom had been
represented by Marx, Lenin, Engels, before J.
Krishnamurti had appeared on the world stage.

49
 But the aspiration for unconditional freedom in
the orbit of religion and spirituality had remained
unverbalized, unfocused as it were. The aspiration
for brotherhood, world-brotherhood had found ex-
pression through Madame Blavatsky and the theoso-
phical society, but they got entangled in certain
other things.
Let us come back to J. Krishnamurti about whom
you have asked me a question. The aspiration for
freedom, discovering the meaning of freedom in
religion and spirituality, setting the human psyche
free of all dogma's, theories, sectarianism, the
authority of masters, the network of discipleship,
did not he represent that? That's exactly what
Jesus had represented: 'What are you doing in the
house of my Father?', said he, scolding those who
were using corruption in the house of the Father;
in the synagoge. That was his way of saying it,
and the ten commandments were the proclamation
of a freedom in that context of life.
Now we are looking at what you imagine to be a
continuity, if you at all want to call it continuity.
I don't see it as a continuation. I see it as a
cycle, not a horizontal continuation, but a spiral
cycle, a vertical cycle.
So Krishnamurti became a representative of the
aspiration for unconditional freedom and he demon-
strated that in his life.
In every changing context such transpsychological
aspirations, the sacred aspirations of the human
heart for love, compassion, freedom, peace or
whatever you call it, are going to be represented
by individuals and if you like to call that a conti-
nuation, you may do so.
Theoretical continuity is a dead continuity. Cycles
have sirnularity but no continuation. After all: a
human being who was picked up from his family and
country and surroundings, language and culture at
the tender age of fourteen and was brought up in
the U.K. and in Europe had a distinct role to play.
Another person, who has been born in India,
brought up in India, worked with the masses, lived

50
among the poor, will have a different way of opera-
ting.
There cannot be a continuity in the ways of opera-
tion, in the style of working, in the presentation
of the truth and you need not use the term 'same'
truth, because there are no different truths.
The variety of expressions, simularity of the con-
tent, different characteristics of the pjersonali-
ties, isn't that all wealth of life? There cannot be
uniformity, and if there were, it would become
rather boring, wouldn't it? So, when you ask me
'Are you a living continution of Krishnamurti?', I
say: 'yes and no'.

51
5. T H E MOVING O F THOUGHT

We shall be taking up the relationship between

the thought structure and psychic mutation for our
joint exploration. There are a number of questions
about the thought-structure, its movement, personal
memory, racial memory, the implications of mutation
in daily living and so on.
We will have to focus our energies jointly on the
phenomenon of what we call a thought-structure.
When we say that the content of human conscious-
ness is thought, we imply that the content is
knowledge, verbal knowledge acquired since child-
hood. Skills and talents cultivated as the cultivation
of your skills and talents is necessary to meet
the social compulsions. The content of thought is
also inheritance contained in the body. The inheri-
tance gives the intimation of its existence through
emotional inclinations, behavioural tendencies,
trends in thinking and a sense of criteria. Aesthetic
criteria of beauty and ugliness, moral standards,
norms and criteria inherited from the family, the
community, the religious community like a non-
intellectual discrimination between sin and virtue,
good and evil.
The content of thought-structure is also, or rather
seems to be the racial experiences concealed in
the depths of our consciousness throwing up the
intimations in the form of dreams at night and
sometimes also in the day-time. Thought-structure
implies the movement of all what we have enumera-
ted for the sake of newcomers in our daily living.
In order that mutation occurs in the consciousness,
it seems to me it is vitally necessary that knowled-
ge about the thought-structure gets converted
into understanding of it.
It is easy to read books, attend talks and get a
verbal knowledge, but the known may not be the
understood. You may not be even personally acqua-
inted with the facts of the known. Those who
would like to discover what mutation is and would
like to allow the mutation to occur in their lives.

52
will have to begin by observing the movements of
thought-structure in their daily living. Observation
seems to be the first step.
When you observe the movement of thoughts, ideas,
emotions, wishes, desires, trends, tendencies, invo-
luntary, inclinations and the whole paraphernalia,
you get acquainted with the facts. From knowledge
about the thought-structure you have proceeded and
arrived at the acquaintance, a personal acquain-
tance of the fact of it. You have observed the
fact of it in your daily living as the movement
takes places within you.
The next step would be to observe the movement
of mind or thought-structure in other people around
you with whom you are living. Then you might
notice that the movement of anger or jealousy,
concern, care or tenderness of affection, the
movement of assertion or aggression is just the
same whether it takes place in X, Y, Z or in
yourself, whether it takes place in a man or a
woman of your country or that of a far-off country.
Then you observe that the movement of thought-
structure is common to the whole mankind. The
expressions may be different. A Hindu bom in
India might talk in terms of the Veda's, the Upa-
nishads, the Gita. A Muslim bom in the Middle East
might talk of Sufism or the Koranishariv and the
verses from the Koran. The language would be
different, the expression of anger or pettiness or
ambition may differ from country to country but
the content is the same.
Somebody has put a question; how is it that the
knowledge differs from person to person; why do
you say that mentally we are not seperate when
the knowledge is different. The language is diffe-
rent. The knowledge, that is to say the formation
of ideas, the expression of ideaologies may be
different. Don't you have different designs in the
clothes you wear and the fashion, the mode of
your clothes. The modes are different, aren't they?
The Japanese have one way of having their dresses
made and the Indians have another in the Middle

53
East, but the cotton or the silk or the wool or
the man-made fibre out of which the apparel, the
clothing is made is just the same.
In the same way the process of naming, identifying,
organizing a pattern of behaviour, codifying,
standardizing, norms and criteria's for behaviour,
is just the same. The content is the same though
there is a vast variety in the expressions.
So after having got acquainted with the fact of
the movement of knowledge and inheritance in your
life, the involuntary momentum of the tendencies,
the inclinations, the evaluations, etc., you observe
them operating in other people, you correlate your
observation that has taken place in relation to
various human beings you come across and the act
of correlating your observations in your life and
in the life of others converts the acquaintance
into understanding. You begin with verbal knowled-
ge, you proceed towards acquaintance, a pjersonal
contact through observation and then you take the
next step of correlating of what you have observed.
It's the correlation of the facts you have observed
that sets you free of addiction, attachment to your
feelings, ideas, values, etc., because you see that
these values have been fed into you, the ideas have
been transmitted into you neuro-chemically; they
don't belong to you or they do not belong to the
other person. That has been the neuro-chemical
pattern of behaviour, organized and standardized
by the human race. May be a jjersonal expression
but it's an expression of the collective activity.
So thought is the product of collective organized
activity, and that helps you if you are an honest,
a genuine enquirer eager to discover the meaning
of life. That enables you to feel free of all the
attachment to your reactions. We are idol worship-
pers, we worship our images about ourselves and
we naively believe that the images we have built
vp about others are the facts. So all the time in
the movement of relationship our reactions become
the criteria for judging and evaluating others. My
dislike for another person, his or her behaviour

54
becomes the criteria. And from dislilce I very easily
move into a value judgement about the other
person, 'he is not good, she's not good', because
I do not like her. I do not like the way she talks
or he talks or moves around or wears the clothes
or uses the languages. So dislikes prejudices become
the criteria for forming value judgements, please
do see this.
Somebody is unfair to me, unjust to me and I get
hurt. Very natural. Sensitivity and intelligence
feels the maladjustment of the behaviour of the
other person, the incorrectness of the behaviour
and immediately as a thorn pricks the foot, the
skin of the foot; that behaviour, the ugliness, the
imbalance, the incorrecmess pricks the sensitivity,
that's very natural, isn't it? But then that getting
hurt, because I have become hurt, I was hurt, I
have felt the pain; so my feeling the pain, my
feeling the sense of hurt becomes tremendously
magnified and important to me.
In a moment I forget that I have to respond to
the situation that has brought the person who has
hurt me and myself together. In life we have been
brought together; a job situation, a marriage
situation, an organization situation, temporary
togetherness or a lifelong togetherness. I have a
responsibility as a human being to respond to the
situation either resist the unfair behaviour, resist
the injustice. And if the injustice or the unfairness
has been sheltered by the socio-economic or politi-
cal system, I have to have the courage to non
co-operate with that system. But I can't do any
of these, because I'm hurt, tremendously hurt. My
pride is hurt, my vanity is hurt and 1 have no
courage to resist the injustice, to fight the system.
So I find an escape in self-pity. Self-pity is a
sophisticated escape and the modem human beings
have a network of modern escapes, as the ancients
had their own networks of escapes.
So I proceed from the feeling of hurt and pain to
self-pity, which is a negative energy, which be-
nimbs my biological structure and I inflict ipon

55
myself the state of mental depression. If I allow
that to stay longer, then it can become a pathologi-
cal condition and I can be a patient of depressive
psychosis, melancholic. Do you see what happens
when you worship your reactions?
On the other hand, if you have seen the movement
of thought-structure you do feel sorry for the
person who is unfair or unjust. You understand
that that incorrect or ugly way of behaviour by
that person must have had some cause in his or
her life. You ignore the ugliness of the behaviour
and respond to the situation, do the needful, do
the needfial that is required of you. So when you
fight back, you resist, you non co-operate, you
are acting, you are not victimized by your reaction.
But you stay put in that sense of hurt, self-pity,
negativity, depression, so that you don't have to
fight back, you see? One who has seen the move-
ment of thought as the movement of inheritance,
the conditionings organized, standardized by society
and transmitted into us, the biological structure
that we are, one who sees that does not allow
this victimization. We are victims of our reactions,
patterns of reactions and they become escapes.
If you have proceeded from knowledge to acquain-
tance and from acquaintance through correlation
to an understanding of the whole human process
of conditioning, organizing, standardizing patterns
of behaviour which might be necessary to live as
a society, you see the whole game and you do
not allow yourself to be victimized by the movement
of the past in you. So there is no confusion and
no chaos in the movement of thought-structure in
you. Understanding eliminates confusion. It brings
about clarity. It eliminates disorder and creates
an elegant order in the movement of your knowled-
ge and inheritance. You leran how to handle it.
You learn how to relate to the mechanical repetiti-
ve movement of the thought-strixiture, the knowled-
ge, the inheritance, exjjerience in other people as
well as in yourself. There is nothing to glorify,
nothing to condemn, but to see the diings as they

56
are and handle diem with comjietence, with self-
cx)nfidence, with elegance.
So the movement of knowledge and inheritance in
you, the movement of thoughts in you has a
fundamental role to play in your life. You become
aware of that and allow that movement to take
place in its field of relevance in a sane orderly
non-confijsed way. If there is chaotic behaviour
of the thought movement we will be far, far away
from the sensitivity that is required in the whole-
ness of your being for the mutation to occur.
Sensitivity cannot be compartmental, partial, frag-
mental. The whole being has to be in a state of
vibrating with that unconditional sensitivity, which
seems to be the nature of intelligence. It's only
when there is an unobstructed flow of sensitivity
in all the layers of your being and all the move-
ments of your being that there is a possibility of
the transmutation taking place.
So from understanding we have grown into clarity,
that is absence of confusion and the elegance of
orderliness which is absence of chaos and anarchy.
An emotion, a sentiment, a feeling comes vp, surges
up in the midst of your work, your movement of
relationship, you become aware of it, you correlate
it to the wholeness of your life. You observe and
find out whether it is relevant consistent to what
you want to do in life. And if it is not consistent,
if it is not relevant to what you want to do in
life, you just ignore, ignore the upsurge and your
courage to ignore allows it to subside. You observe
the upsurge taking place in you which is the move-
ment of the past and your fearlessness to ignore,
not to be overwhelmed by it, saying that it has
no relevance with what you want to do, allows it
to subside. It's a very romantic game to observe
the surging up and projecting of the past, wanting
to overwhelm your being, flood your being with
the momentum of the past, and the austerity of
your alertness causing as natural a movement of
its subsiding as the surging up was natural.
This is education, my friends. It is this education

57
that intensifies the sensitivity and deepens it.
Sensitivity has to have a tremendous depth in the
being and a tremendous energy and momentun.
Not the flickering, occasional, momentary flickering
of sensitivity. Trickeling of drops do not constitute
rivers; the waters have to gush out of the rocks
of the mountains and then those small streams
gathering momentum grow into huge rivers.
If these two points have been made by the speaker
sufficiently clear, let us proceed that having grown
into the clarity and orderliness of the movement
of thought-structure, we have through observation
noticed that this movement of words which consti-
tutes knowledge, the movement of tensions and
pressures, which are due to the acceptance of
theories and ideas, norms and criterias, is of no
use for further exploration of the wholeness of
life, of the mystery of interrelatedness of life,
discovering if there is anything like divinity,
discovering if there is any possibility of a quantum
jump into another orbit of consciousness, dimension
of consciousnees. For this exploration the word,
the thought, which is die past and its movement
in the form of knowledge has no value whatsoever.
It has a value in relation to the material world
and the man-made structures, where we are going
to use it elegantly in an orderly way, without
getting bogged down by organized and standardized
patterns of reactions and evaluations, knowing
what they are we have equipped ourselves to use
that thought movement on the material level and
also in the realm of the conceptual world which
is man-made.
The world of knowledge, philosophy, theology,
literature, fine arts is a conceptual world, a non-
visible, intangible, imperceptible, conceptual world,
constructed of concepts, ideas, composed of words,
sounds, chiselled out meanings in the dictionary,
meanings by tradition, meanings by association.
It's a beautiful conceptual world of measurements
of symbols, of ideas. So we use that as we have
to live in society and we have to deal with the

58
man-made structures, economic, political, social,
cultural.
But beyond that this movement has no relevance,
has no utility, because it is a movement of the
past. Thought is the past. And as long as the past
tries to propagate itself, project itself upon the
present, there will not be the discovery of the
mystery of what the present is, what the timeless
present is, what the eternity and infinity imply.
Because the movement of the past will clothe the
present with the terms and terminologies organized
and standardized, sanctified through centuries; so
that movement has to stop.
You are asking me what is the relation of the
movement of thought-structure to mutation. The
relation is a graceful discontinuity of the movement
of thought-structure. We have already mentioned
that consciousness is an energy of self-awareness.
It is due to this quality of self-awareness which
becomes manifest in the human race, to some
extent in the animal world, but otherwise it is
mute though existing and operating in other species.
That self-awareness makes it possible for the
thought-structure to observe itself, to understand
itself and to be aware of the built-in limitations.
So it becomes aware that its movement is of no
value and of no relevance beyond this and it
relaxes. It is the unconditional relaxation of the
thought-movement which is its contribution towards
psychic mutation.
So from knowledge to acquaintance, from acquain-
tance to understanding, from understanding to
order and from orderliness to movement in the
field of relevance and relaxation into non-movement
or non-motion, where it has no relevance. It's a
dual role to play.
The relaxation into non-motion is called silence.
Silence is not something to be acquired from
outside. It's not an attribute to be cultivated. It's
not something that you can build tp by a code of
conduct, by tantra's, by mantra's, by asana's, by
pranayama's; it's the perflme of unconditional

59
relaxation of the known, of the knowledge, of the
thought. We do not create it. It is concealed in
that magnificent unconditional relaxation.
Please do see this. The adjective 'unconditional' is
as important as the word 'relaxation', because
those who pursue silence, those who believe that
silence is something that can be practised may
miss this point that silence is the jjerfume of
relaxation, concealed, contained in relaxation, not
apart from it. The known, the thought, the past
does not move; we allow ourselves an opportunity
to be in that state when the thought-movement is
unwarranted. Because of long-standing habit, even
when you sit quietly, the thoughts pop up. There
has not been any order. Our thought-structure
has been behaving chaotically. We have never paid
attention to an inner orderliness in the movement
of thought or knowledge or experience or inheritan-
ce.
That crowding of thoughts, as we are used to live
in crowded cities and we have now become used
to the noises, the aggressive sounds, smells, aggres-
sive lights and if you go to a solitary place you
miss the noise and you miss the crowds and you
create your own crowds and sounds and noises. We
have become addicted to them.
So when we sit for self-education we notice the
chaotical movement of thoughts and emotions
coming up when they are not needed. You have
allowed them to come up like that, to distract
your minds, to distract what you are doing in
your daily living. You have never been whole.
Each moment in each action, in each relationship
we have never been totally present, always distrac-
ted, disturbed, calculating, manoeuvring, manipula-
ting and we thought that was the way of living,
always in the crowd of thoughts and emotions.
So it's very natural that when you sit down they
do come up. There is an inner anarchy, inner
chaos and such chaotic human beings, beings living
in the tension of chaos, in the confusion of anar-
chy, we want to create world peace. We are at

60
war with ourselves. We are not at peace with
ourselves. Peace or silence, that perfume of relaxa-
tion and the movement of relationship, which is
the movement of that relaxation, cannot be there
as long as there is a chaotic thought-structure,
disorderly thought-structure and its ugly movement.
The slightest relationship creates an imbalance,
pride, vanity, hurt, depression, jealousy, anger-it
doesn't know how to relate with other people with-
hout creating an imbalance in oneself.
And the mystery of relationship is to relate in a
state of complete relaxation with a graceful inner
equipoise which is peace. When human relationships
shall breathe that perfume of equipoise and relaxa-
tion, then there will not be antisocial tendencies
and cornqDtions and the inhuman ambitions of domi-
nating, exploiting others. It's only people who
are disturbed inwardly, at war with themselves or
who are cowards, who either become aggressive or
who create bullies for themselves.
So please do see with me that we have to educate
ourselves, that is to say we have to give ourselves
an opportunity to put ourselves in a state of neuro-
chemical relaxation, total cerebral relaxation. Not
while you are sleeping; while you are awake.
Meditation is that unconditional relaxation while
you are awake and while you are in the midst of
movement of relationship. It's an alternative way
of living, of moving into relationship. So the
thought-structure goes into abeyance gracefully,
without being compelled to do so.
We have been trying to compel it, to force it into
silence by techniques, by methods, or by administe-
ring chemicals or drugs that way transitorilly
changes and experiences might happen and do
occur. Stimulation of inner experiences, racial
experiences also can occur. In spite of the stimula-
tion of occult or the hidden, the transcendental,
in spite of all those powers and experiences stimu-
lated for some time, temporarily, transitorilly, it
doesn't cause a wholistic mutation in the whole of
the mutant. A change here and there on the peri-

61
phery, on the fringes of consciousness may be
noticeable changes, and the society glorifies those
patchwork of changes. But the patchwork of chan-
ges on die fringes of consciousness, on the periphe-
ry of consciousness, does not allow; does not create
the scope, the space and does not allow the mutati-
on to take place.
Mutation is a dimensional wholistic change occurring
suddenly, timelessly in the whole of the mutant,
not partially, not compartmentally, not fragmentari-
ly. The wholeness of the being suddenly manifests
another dimension in its movement, in its expressi-
on.
So we educate ourselves. We learn to be in a state
of non-motion. If the thoughts come up, as they
are inhabiting the consciousness in a disorderly
way and we notice their coming up, we allow the
noticing to take place. We are not watching them,
we are not intentionally observing the movement.
But the movement gets exposed to our sensitivity,
to our intelligence and we allow that exposure of
the content of thought-structure and the noticing
of the intelligence to take place. We do not junp
in and say: " I am observing because I , the thought,
the past has gone into relaxation". If the I moves
and says: " I observe" its observation will be a
projection and continuity of the past, personal
and collective.
It is not an intentional purposeful activity of the
ego. It's a happening. There seems to be a sensiti-
vity, besides, independent of, seperate from the
movement of thought-structure and in the disconti-
nuity of the movement perhaps that sensitivity
will blossom and flower.
If the thoughts are noticed, let them be noticed.
If they are perceived by the wholeness of your
being, let diem be perceived. So a sense of consci-
ous effort to observe, to watch and the strain to
watch thoughts as they come, the effort to evaluate
them and say they were bad thoughts, they were
good thoughts,, that will be a vicious game, moving
in a circle.

62
As the clouds of the sky are noticed by the sight
contained in your eyes without your conscious
effort, your eyes are open, you are in a state of
awakening, you are awake and therefore the sight
notices the clouds, you are not looking at them
but they are seen. It's an involuntary perception
which occurs. You are awake and the auditory
nerves notice the sounds. You are not there to
hear them, you don't want to listen to them. The
movement of audition is not related to the ego,
but it is a part of life of this biological structure.
The sensitivity runs through the auditory nerves
and the sound is heard. It runs through the optical
nerves and the forms, the shapes, the colours are
seen. In the same way the sensitivity rushes when
you sit down quietly and perceives the movement
of thought.
So please let us not create a problem out of the
movement of thoughts and say: " I sat down quietly
but the thoughts do not stop". They might not
stop if we attach too much importance to their
movement. But if we innocently let the exposure
take place without evaluating them, without questi-
oning why they are there, without trying to pressu-
rize them into discontinuity, if we can just be
with that, to be with a fact with that steadiness
of perception, is something marvellous. Just the
two of you, the fact and yourself. Here of course
it is not even two. As the reflection in a mirror
of yourself and you are not two, the movement of
thoughts and the sensitivity that notices the
movement are just you, not two, but one.
If there is an effortless innocency while you sit
down quietly and not a pressurized consciousness,
not an artificially stimulated tension and a state
of suspense: 'now what is going to happen', if the
thoughts do not move 'what will happen to me?'
That suspense, that fear, that tension, all these
are really symptoms of the resistance by the self,
the me. So we notice the movement, we notice the
resistance of the ego, which does not want to stop.
That may happen for some time, but if throughout

63
the day, throughout the movement of relationship
this state of simple perception is sustained, the
sensitivity is sustained, then the thought-structure
learns to relax completely.
When we say thought-structure, we are referring
to the neuro-chemical system and its state of
conditioning. It's a neuro-chemical behaviour, the
movement of thought or feeling or sentiment or
idea is a neuro-chemical movement in our bodies.
Now when you learn asana's and pranayama's,
your physical structure, the muscular, the glandular,
it was conditioned in one way and when you learn
asana's you are deconditioning your muscular or
glandular or neurological organism. It was conditio-
ned in one way. In the same way the thought-
stncture was conditioned to move as through
learning yoga asana's you decondition the muscular
system and there is a new freedom and elasticity,
pliability. In the same way the thought-structure
educated through observation and silence, through
simple perception and relaxation gets deconditioned;
the habit of constantly moving, incessantly moving,
chattering, which was the conditioning, disappears.
So silence and relaxation result in a deconditioning
of the whole thought-structure. A person who has
learned yoga asana's, when he moves, walks, runs,
climbs, sits down, stands up, the movements express
a different quality of elasticity, freshness and
energy. You might have noticed it in your own
life. In the same way when the thought-structure
has been deconditioned of the incessant movement,
the habitual tensions, the rigidity, etc., in the
movement of relationship throughout the day the
thought-structure moves in a relaxed way. Its
expression has a different quality then. It has a
peacefiiness, it is composed, collected, not imbalan-
ced. I'm talking about the yoga of consciousness,
not the yoga of the physical body. I'm talking
about Raja Yoga, if you like. The unconditional
relaxation in the movement of relationship is the
essence of Raja Yoga, is the essence of meditation
as a dimension of life and living.

64
There is relaxation not only when you sit down in
the room, but while you are moving, travelling in
a car, a tram, a bus, an aeroplane, spending those
miserably long hours at aerodromes, the stuffy
lounges full of smoke of so many cigars and ciga-
rettes. The relaxation is invincible, it does not
get damaged, it becomes a dimension of the being.
So when an alternative way of moving through
relationship with an unconditional relaxed state is
there, then the possibility for a mutation to occur
is created in our life. Then you do not move
whether you are in the Netherlands, or in England
or France, as a Frenchman, an Englishman or a
EXitchman; you move as a human being. You may
be talking in the Dutch language or French langua-
ge, eating the food cooked in the French way or
the Dutch way, but inwardly you are an unconditio-
ned human being. Your responses to fxjiitical,
economic challenges, expressed in your country or
the whole of Europe or the whole of world, are
responses of a human being committed to human
life. Not committed to theories of nationalities,
nationalisms, racialism. Uncommitted ideologically
and committed and dedicated to the humanness of
the human race; human freedom, human justice.
Not an Israeli justice and justice in Lebanon or
Iranian justice or Indian or Lankan justice.
The foundation for world peace will be laid in the
human consciousness. It cannot be laid by bricks
and mortars in the earth, it cannot be laid in
structures, socio-economic or political, the foundati-
on has to be laid in die individual psyche.
If the individual human being does not change
and the texture of his or her relationship with
human and non-humans does not change, world
peace is going to be a Utopia, an impotent Utopia.
Do you see how the challenge of world peace gets
related to the quality and dimension of the human
consciousness?

"Siqjposing mutation has taken place in the life of

an individual", says a questioner, "how will it

65
affect the human race?"
Why doesn't die mutation occurring in the hfe of
one person, affect all of us? Either die question
is born of naYveness, we are very naive or it is
bom of a concealed greediness, uneamed income.
One person exerting and working upon oneself
allows the radical revolution to take place in the
psyche and you and all of us profit by it. We do
like unearned incomes, don't we? Inheritance is
an unearned income. Haven't such individuals in
whose life the ascendance into a different dimensi-
on, an upward quantum jump as it were, has taken
place, haven't such individuals provided a direction
to human civilization and growth? Haven't we
been learning as a race from such individuals?
Could we have talked about a non-authoritarian
approach to a spiritual enquiry and irrelevance of
a guru, master, disciple relationship to enquiry?
Could we have talked about it hundred years ago,
in conferences, camps all over the world? Hasn't
a person called J. Krishnamurti set the whole human
race free of the authority in psychic relationships?
We may accept, we may not accept it, because we
are afraid of freedom. We are afraid of responsibili-
ty, we would like to be led by others. We would
not mind if somebody carries us on his or her
shoulders to freedom, to enlightenment. We would
not mind if we were led like a flock of sheep
towards enlightenment or liberation.
But a person called J. Krishnamurti stood up and
said "no authority is needed, this exploitation,
relationship of exploitation, dependency between
enquirer and enlightened person has got to end"
and he had to suffer the consequences of his
fearless proclamations and march ahead alone.
Wasn't it an individual? I am referring to J. Krish-
namurti because he has been a phenomenon and
he was walking around in flesh and blood, just a
few years ago amongst all of us. Hasn't he provided
a new direction to the science of psychology, didn't
he stand as a challenge to scientists? I am not
worshipping the authority, but I'm sharing with

66
you objective facts. I could talk about Buddha the
same way, Jesus, but they are so far away.
Before our stupidity converts J. Krishnamurti, the
person into a God like Jesus or Buddha, it is
desirable that we look at die phenomenon rationally
and learn from it. So why does a question of
psychic mutation occurring in an individual affecting
the whole human race, come up in anybody's mind
at all?
A person who goes through a mutation is not a
head of a state, not a political leader, he is a
teacher at best and teachers don't indulge in
aggression, even psychologically. They communicate,
they do not assert. They share, they do not propa-
gate. They can have dialogues, but they cannot
impose, non-imposition, sharing, non-assertion,
non-aggression, that's the way of love. And fortu-
nately Truth cannot be organized. Material, econo-
mic, political matters, can be organized, but truth
cannot be organized.
We cannot expect the occurrence of a psychic
mutation developing into a world-wide organization,
carrying on propaganda, indoctrinating the people.
Is that what you mean by the utility and the
benefit for the human race? If that is the meaning,
it's not the way love functions, it's not the way
compassion functions.
Wherever the windows and doors are open, the light
enters. Wherever there is receptivity, teachings
enter.
Occurrence of a mutation in die life of an individu-
al is really speaking not a personal event, but a
cosmic event. It has cosmic implications, because
through that person and the movement of relation-
ship of that person, a new energy enters the orbit
of racial consciousness. The body dies, the vehicle
as it were governed by the law of nature dies some
day, but the energy that has entered the human
consciousness goes on functioning. It has no death.
It may take a new form of expression, because die
context of global human life changes not only every
day, but perhaps every hour. Through science and

67
technology, through the interweaving of political
and human relationships, the context changes. It's
a marvellous world to live in in spite of its ugliness
and violence. We have become a global human
family. We will live together or perish together.
So it's a cosmic event occurring in space and
time in the life of an individual. It is perhaps an
expression of the supreme cosmic intelligence
through a person, through an individual. There is
the individual body, but inwardly in the conscious-
ness there is no center of the me, there is no
circumference as knowledge and thought-structure,
therefore it becomes the dwelling place for the
cosmic intelligence, the supreme intelligence. So
the occurring of the mutation being itself a cosmic
event, the question of its relationship with the
total human race as a seperate event, is unwarran-
ted.
From knowledge to acquaintance, from acquaintance
to orderliness, from orderliness to relaxation and
relaxation blossoming into a state of silence, leading
to meditation as a dimension in relationship,
inviting the other, the mutation, the transformation,
inviting it to grace the consciousness.

68
6. ANSWERS T O QUESTIONS

A questioner says that the South American Indians

have a nobility; they are not attached to anything
around them, they do not have a sense of identifi-
cation with anything at all. So one might say that
they live in a state of non-attachment and non-
identification. The same people, however, come into
contact with the so-called civilized people, the
civilized South Americans, and in no time their
minds get corrupted, they develop a sense of at-
tachment and identification. "On the other hand",
says the questioner, "you come across sages, saints
or yogi's in the world, who have gone through the
process of self-consciousness and the movement of
thought-structure, and have grown into a state of
non-attachment, non-identification". "Is it necessa-
ry", asks the questioner, for the human race, to
pass through this phase of self-consciousness and
the movement of thought-structure, before it finds
itself in the dimension of cosmic consciousness?"
Quite a big question.
Those of you who have been watching with a sensi-
tivity the happenings around us in the world, might
recollect what happened from the sixties to the
eighties in the world, specially America, North
America, and many of the Wes-European countries,
and perhaps Australia, New-Zealand, etc. Was it
not in the sixties that the youth of the developed
world, the affluent world, realized that the civiliza-
tion they were born in, had built-in neuroticism and
violence. It was a depersonalized and a dehumanized
culture and they wanted to escape from it. They
rejected it intellectually.
There was a period of nearly a quarter of a century
when the youth turned to primitivity as a way of
living, run away from cities, jobs, the disciplines
of social and economic life, reject the social code
of conduct, reject all authority of religions and
spirituality. Form your own communes or centers:
the hippies, the Beatles, the beatniks, the flower-
children. There was quite a movement, quite a wave

69
 in that period of human history, when the youth
turned away from rationality, imagining rather
naively that they could go back to psychological
primitivity and a primitive way of living.
A South-American Indian, or the tribals in different
parts of the world, as one has watched them in
India, millions of them, do not have developed
brains. The emotional asfject of their life is also
not developed, formed, there is no maturity. Their
bodies are healthier, but the brains are not deve-
loped. The crudeness and the primitivity of consci-
ousness has a kind of roughness and unpleasantness
about it.
I have walked through the villages, the mountains,
among the tribal people in India, for about ten
years of my life. No word here is spoken from a
book, except the book of life.
The paganism of the tribals, the mountain people,
the jungle people, hasn't got the flavour of ecologi-
cal consciousness or awareness as a modern human
being has. The capacity to analyse, discriminate
perceptions is not there. There is giving in to the
momentum of impulses and instincts. Surely, instinc-
tive or impulsive behaviour is not the conduct of
innocency. It hasn't got any sanctity or sacredness.
So the youth that tried to run away in the sixties
or seventies up to the eighties, expanding consci-
ousness, administering drugs and chemicals for
extrasensory perceptions and transcendental expe-
riences, got disillusioned. The so-called sex revolu-
tions and freedom from all sense of norms and cri-
teria's, aesthetical and moral, proved disastrous
for them. One has witnessed all these movements,
because one has been travelling, wandering around
continents for more than a quarter of a century by
now. So do what you will, it is not possible to
turn back to the primitivity, crudity, uncultured,
impulsive, instinctive behaviour. Nor is it desirable
or necessary.
The noble savage of the questioner from South-
America gets victimized at the touch of modern
civilization, because there is immaturity. The inner

70
being lias not been shaped, not developed.
So what one wants to share with you is that the
refinement and sophistication that has taken place
through cerebral activity, through the genius of
human race expressing itself in the activity of
naming and identifying, seems to be a necessary
phase of human growth or a necessary phase of the
unfolding of the potential within the hunan being.
The supreme intelligence, the energy of self-aware-
ness permeating the cosmos, is not able to tolerate
and to contain disorder, darkness of ignorance, cru-
deness, because intelligence is the tendermost
energy, it has it's own elegance and majesty. It's
lighter than the lightest feather in the world, and
it has the grandeur of clarity. That is the energy
contained in us, contained in the universe, unfolding
itself in innumerable ways. So the capacity to think,
to name, to identify, to formulate measurements,
the effort to relate ourselves to the perceptions
around us, is something very beautiful. It is the
process of purifying the consciousness, sophisti-
cating the consciousness. When on the sensual,
instinctive perceptions you build up a beautiflil
concept, by converting the abstract perception
into an idea, you are expressing the energy, contai-
ned in you, on the perceptual world, that we share
with the animals and the other non-human species.
We have built up a magnificent world of concepts,
ideas, knowledge, that is how our way of living
has been sophisticated. Instead of living in the
holes of the trees and caves in the mountains, we
found out a way of building a cottage, a hut, a
house. We went too far and started building skys-
crapers, multi-storeyed buildings, and uglified the
whole thing; that's a different issue. But let us be
very clear that in the process of naming and identi-
fying, in the process of formulating measurements,
we created an idea of the 'me', the 'I-ness', to
the consciousness.
From the perceptual level to the conceptual we
proceeded, and among the various concepts - the
concept of a psychological time, of musical notes.

71
the concept of arithmetical nimbers, the concept
and idea of a point and various angles in geometry,
the concept of a word, engineered and carved out
of sound - we created a concept of an invisible
' I ' or the 'self and started working with that
presumption. Building a society would have been
impossible if the human beings had not accepted
the standardized, the organized concept of an ' I ,
the 'me', the 'self, so the distinct names to
distinct persons, the descriptions of their qualities
and the language of addressing one another as 'you'
and 'me', 'thou' and ' I ' . So self-consciousness is
not a bondage, it was a phase in the unfolding of
various energies contained in consciousness.
Perhaps where we went wrong, or took a wrong
turn, was attributing ultimate reality to the concep-
tual world. The concept is a concept, it has no fac-
tual content. The word is not the thing. The con-
cept is not the reality. It has a utility, it has
convenience, it has its own beauty.
The birds flock together, the animals herd together,
and we create societies and look upon ourselves as
members of society. You cannot show society apart
from you and me. You cannot show a wood apart
from the trees. But the society is an idea. There
is a male and a female, call it a man and a woman,
and there is the sexual relationship, and you say
"mother" and "father". The motherhood and the
fatherhood is a concept, enriching the biological
behaviour, along with the matter-of-fact life, there
is a matter-of-concept life. It's an enrichment, but
when we forget that these are all ideas useful for
social life, but has no ultimate reality we make a
mistake. We forget that the words "me" and the
"not me", the ' I ' and the 'thou', have only relative
reality, conceptual existence, useful for social
life, but apart from that, there is neither the
'you' nor the 'me'. When we forget that and when
the symbols and concepts that we had formulated
for our convenience become the fetters and the
chains and bondages due to our misuse and abuse,
we begin to suffer. All psychological suffering is

72
self-inflicted. The physical suffering has causes,
but psychological suffering is self-inflicted and
self-sustained.
So it's not a painful process. It's a very enjoyable
process of developing the cerebral faculties. Develo-
ping the emotional aspect of your life, developing
a sense of personality for living in society, it's
all part of the game that we are playing togetiier.
We will be living in societies. We were living as
members of nations, and now we are called upon
to live as members of a global human family.
We were mistaken, we believed tiiat we were the
masters of the nature around us and now we are
called vpon to realize that the earth is a much
an organism and a being as we are. And the moun-
tains and oceans are fellow companions, not objects
to be exploited by us. They are not subservient to
us, they are our equals.
We shall be living in societies together, and there-
fore this process of naming, identifying discrimina-
ting, forming measurements, using diem skilfully,
is going to be a necessity of life and let us be
very clear about it. Without attributing ultimate
reality to the conceptual world, we have to live
in it, move in it, handle it.
Imagine that we are artists, and we have drawn
on the canvas a painting or sketch of the ocean,
beautiful mystical blue and the waves and the
skies above. Anybody entering the room says: "Ah,
what a beautiful painting". And you see that, you
call it 'ocean'. Do you ever say to yourself: "Come
on, we shall go and bathe in this ocean?" It's a
huge painting, it nearly creates an optical illusion,
and you feel that you are standing on the beach
of an ocean. You are aware that you have drawn
it, it's a painting.
In the Same way, the human race has to learn that
all the concepts and symbols are its own constructi-
ons for particular use. The ocean in the painting
is not the real ocean and yet that painting has its
own beauty, and it gives you tremendous pleasure.
It keeps you company in your room and yet you

73
cannot bathe in it.
So the 'self and the 'self-consciousness', the
activities springing from this concept of 'self, in
the context of social economic surroundings, it has
a role to play in life. But it hasn't got the reality
that life has. The painting is realistic, but it is
not the real ocean, not the real mountains. So the
concepts may be realistic, but they are not the
reality, please do see this.
When this distinction between the reality and the
realistic concepts and measurements is there in us,
when there is an awareness of the substance of
reality which can never be verbalized - the words
can indicate it -, when we are aware of the time-
lesness of reality, there is no confusion. The center
freeness of reality, the non-individuated, holistic
nature of reality, when we use them skilfully-, and
we play the game of being social members and live
together, have our pleasures and pains together,
when we see the absolute reality of life and the
relative utility of the conceptual world of symbols
and ideas, there is no confusion. As you do not
get attached to the ocean in your painting, you do
not get attached to any symbol, any idea, whether
it's an idea of psychological time, of the self, the
me.
You grow into an awareness of what is real and
what is not real, what is the essence of life, the
existential essence, and what is constructed by the
human race for the convenience of living together.
Then no thought and no idea binds you and no
emotional push or pull, attachment or detachment,
indulgence or renunciation ever entangle you.
From primitivity to sophistication and refinement
and from sophistication and refinement to the
elegance of innocency, which is the awareness of
the nature of reality, is the pilgrimage of life.

"In the event of psychic mutation, does the consci-

ousness of the person become identical with the
cosmic consciousness?" It's an academic, theoretical
question, a speculative one. We want to speculate

74
about the state of consciousness. In the event of
psychic mutation, does the person become aware of
what is happening in the lives of all odier beings?
Does he or she understand everything that is hap-
pening?
Now one wonders what the questioner implies by
the term "identical". A human body contains the
earth in its biological structure. It contains the
principle of fire, it contains water, it contains
air. The bone structure represents the earth in the
human body. Would you say that the earth contained
in your and my body is identical with earth as the
whole planet? We see the sunlight when the sun is
shining bright in the skies and the ray of the sun
enters your room and floods it with light. Is the
ray of the sun identical with the sun? The sun is
a wholeness and the ray of the sun also shares the
wholeness, but it is not identical.
When we use the term "identical", we are referring
to the physical scale of its existence- the size, the
shape, the volime. Cosmic energy, permeating the
whole cosmos, permeating everything that exists in
the world, has a scale that you would call "macro-
cosm". In an individual the same energy of intelli-
gence, geting activized and operating, is on the
scale of "microcosm". You see the difference of the
scale?
What do you mean by "identical"? It has a similarity
of nature. As the supreme intelligence manifests in
the cosmos in the form of a mysterious interrela-
tedness in every expression, of every expression,
it manifests itself in a marvellous orderliness,
which hasn't got the harshness of man-made disci-
plines and codes of conduct, but it has the compas-
sion and tenderness of love behind that orderliness.

In the life of a person, who has gone through a

psychic mutation, the same elegance of orderliness
and tenderness of compassion, clarity of understan-
ding, gets manifested. The qualities are the same,
whether on the cosmic level or operating in a per-
son's body, when it is allowed to get activized.

75
 when it can flow through the whole being without
any obstructions, the psychic obstructions and
knots of commitment to ideologies, to theories, to
the past, commitment to patterns of behaviour,
when there are no such psychic obstructions and
the energy can flow through the being unobstructed,
the same qualities perhaps, get manifested.
As the skies give us the space to live, the person
gives the people around psychological space to live,
the freedom. Freedom is psychological space. The
skies never assert, though they are everywhere.
The space is everywhere, never asserts, it just
exists, available to you, receptive to you. In the
same way, it seems to me, that when there is an
occurrence of mutation, and consciousness is no
more tethered to an imaginary pole of the ego or
the self, there is a non-assertive existence, non-
assertive communication, non-assertive glances. It
is not possible for such a person to assert or
become aggressive, to own or possess human beings,
properties, because the sense of "me-ness" and the
"otherness" has disappeared completely, except on
the physical level where the body needs food,
clothing and sleep.
There is a movement of knowledge, but not the
hallucination of a "knower". The movement of expe-
riences goes on, psychic mutation does not make
a person dumb, insensitive, passive. The movement
of experiences goes on rather fast, and yet there
is no building up of an experiencer, having some
continuity. There is the occurring of the experience
and freedom from it, because no experience leaves
any residue behind, as a like or a dislike, a prefe-
rence or a prejudice. The incoming knowledge gets
converted into understanding without any time-lag
and therefore there is no burden on the memory.
Understanding doesn't suffer from forgetfulness,
does it? It is knowledge tiiat can be forgotten,
and love expresses itself effortlessly, doesn't it?
In the same way understanding expresses itself
effortlessly, in every movement.
I hope we have seen that when you acquire know-

76
ledge, tiiere is a sense: " I know it" and " I am
acting according to my knowledge"; so acquisition
of knowledge, storing it in memory and then using
it, i f and when needed.
In the event of understanding, there is no person
who understands it, but there is only the light of
understanding and perhaps the perfume of aware-
ness. The understanding operates without someone
to monitor it; knowledge has to be monitored.
Understanding does not require someone to press
the knob of an incentive to activize it, doesn't
need a monitor to calculate how much to be used,
when to use. There is a spontaneity, effortlessness.
In the event of psychic mutation, the qualities of
consciousness reflected in the behaviour of a
person, are radically different from the behaviour
of a person who lives in the orbit of self-consci-
ousness. From primitivity to self-consciousness and
from self-consciousness the cosmic consciousness,
universal consciousness, awareness. When it is uni-
versal and cosmic, it's better to call it "aware-
ness". So no identicalness, the scales are bound
to remain different and through an individual it
will be a limited expression of the wholeness. To
some extent it will be a conditional expression,
because the human body has its limitations and it
has to use the languages, born in the past. However
the content may be virgin and fresh, as soon as
the content of your being gets verbalized, it has
a mild stink of the past, you can't escape it and
communication becomes possible through verbalizati-
on, therefore one has to reconcile to this mild
stink of the past in the process of verbalization.

"What is the place of man-woman relationship, mar-

ried life, raising children, to spiritual enquiry?"
What is a man-woman relationship? When does one
need it? We are not going to reduce the sex urge,
experienced by a human being, to the primitive,
animal urge. We have been indulging in regressi-
on of psychological evolution, and going back with
vengeance to animality in so many ways. So we are

77
 twisting and distorting that sacred sexurge. It's
a creative energy that we share with the cosmos.
If it's not only a simple, primitive, biological urge,
what is it in the human life? What part does
psychology play in the sex impulse and the sex
urge? That urge seems to be as natural as the
appetite, the thirst, the urge for sleep and so
on. We are born with it.
Either a man and a woman relationship grows
around the aspiration to share the sexual urge
and have a companionship for enjoying the conse-
quences of sexual relationship. Or the man-woman
relationship is only for the romantic, platonic
love or this relationship is somediing we enter
into, because we are afraid of loneliness, living
alone in this mad, violent society; so as a protecti-
ve measure. Or we throw ourselves into a man-
woman relationship in the momentum of an impulse
or an instinct, and never work it out rationally,
till clashes arise.
Leave aside spiritual enquiry or religious enquiry.
If a man and a woman for whatever reasons known
best to them come together and share life; then
their life outside marriage or with sanction of
marriage, or whatever, now they have a joint
adventure.
Do they look ipon it as an ordeal, because they
will discover each other when they will live toge-
ther, not occasionally meeting as friends, or love-
making, or whatever, but when they really begin
to share life, under die searchlight of intimacy, 24
hours together? Love at first sight had shown only
the bright side, or you like to imagine the bright
side, because of the infatuation. But when you
live together, you see also the other side, tiie
shortcomings, the deficiencies, the differences in
approach, the differences in likes and dislikes,
hundred and one things are noticed. Do you call
that a problem? Or do you call that an opportunity
to learn the art of living together in spite of
areas of disagreement, temperamental differences?
And the questioner refers to raising a family. Is

78
the fatherhood or the motherhood a joy in itself?
If a man and woman want to share the joy of
bringing into the universe another human being,
and helping that human being to grow, then it will
not be an ordeal, or a burden. As coming together
was not a burden, but a joint adventure, for the
joy of it, for the fun of it, then also "raising the
family" does not become a problem, an ordeal, but
an opportunity for uncovering our potential of
being a father or a mother; an additional wealth
of relationship.
Of course the children are independent human
beings, though born of you, they have their own
built-in independence. And you cannot take for
granted that they will imitate what you are doing,
they will accept what you are doing, they will be
resjjectful to you. Maybe they will question every-
thing.
A few days before I left India, I was in Mount Abu
and a young couple, who has known Vimala for
many years, came with their 82 year old child to
Mount Abu, because the child was asking them to
be brought over to Vimala. For three or four nights
she had been pressing very hard on them, so they
brought her to me and a surprising dialogue takes
place between the child and your friend Vimala. I
ask her: "What brought you here, my child?" She
said: " I want to tell you something". "Yes". And
the child says: " I want to die". "Oh, why do you
want to die?" She says: "Last year my great-grand-
mother died, and she was sleeping on the floor,
covered with a sheet. I wanted to go and talk to
her, and the elders in the family told me: "Don't
wake her up! She's dead". "Now both my mummie
and daddy want me to go to school. I don't want
to go to school. If I die, I will sleep and cover
myself with a sheet, so they will not wake me up
and send me to school".
I had never heard such a thing from any child in
my life. Her only idea of death was lying on the
floor, being covered with a sheet and nobody wakes
you up. If I tell you stories of my dialogues with

79
children under die age of six, it will take us a
long time! I have many, many tiny friends in many
countries, and what they talk, and their reactions
and their responses are just unthinkable for us,
the grown-ups.
The same child was asking six months ago for the
phone number of Lord Kirshna. They had a small
place of worship where there was that idol of
Krishna, and she had seen her mother and grand-
mother worshipping. So she said: "Where does he
live?" "Oh he has his house somewhere". "Give me
his number, I want to ring him up!"
What I'm telling you is: children have their own
indejjendence; the children born in these days,
because of the vibrations in the atmosphere, have
absolutely a different quality of consciousness.
Now raising these children, is it a problem, is it
an ordeal, or is it a joy? If it is an ordeal, if it
is a problem, if it is looked upon as a cold respon-
sibility, then the act of living would be a burden.
Spiritual enquiry has to be made in the movement
of relationship. The act of living is the only op-
portunity to discover your factual being, to discover
what you are. In the act of living, the content of
consciousness is reflected. So a man and woman
relationship or raising a family, can be an opportu-
nity for self-discovery, for learning the mechanism
of the human mind. It depends qx)n what you make
of it.
The questioner says: " I don't know whether 1 should
get married and raise a family, will that distract
me from spiritual enquiry?" It's a very lovely
question, asked by someone, an honest p)erson, who
wants to move towards spiritual enquiry.
This religion or spirituality is not an escape from
life. You're not required to turn away from your
life, from your daily living, because the daily living
is the only eternity which you can meet in your
life. The day, the moment, is the only opportunity
to meet it and to let it uncover its mystery.
Life is relationship. Living is the movement of get-
ting related, observing what the behaviour of other

80
people does to you, observing the upsurge of reac-
tions, the projection of the past in you, and what
it does to you. Learning to handle die objective
and the subjective without getting imbalanced, you
learn to drive a car, an aeroplane, space rocket,
handle them, handle the robots, the computers.
And when it comes to learning and educating one-
self in handling die thought-structure, handling
the past contained in your biological structure, one
gets nervous.
For a spiritual enquiry, whether you get married
or not is irrelevant. A person who does not get
married may not even dedicate all the energies to
understanding the truth. That person can also live
in a distracted way, running here and there after
desires, wishes, ambitions, and fritter away the
life. A married jjerson, die man and the woman
having the same urge, can share the urge, share
the responsibilities as opportunities. It depends
upon whether there is a willingness to dedicate
oneself to the truth that one understands. It is
easy to investigate. It is easy to arrive at verbal
understanding. The crisis begins after that, because
the truth one has understood may not be very con-
venient. You may not relish the truth that you have
understood after working hard over the investigati-
on, because then the impulses, the instinctive beha-
viours, the desires, the unsteadiness of mind, they
cannot be reconciled with the naked truth. You
want to understand the truth intellectually, and
emotionally you want to continue the same way you
were living before the understanding took place.
"That's my nature, I am- angry by nature, I am
jealous, I get hurt". So one wants to continue
with the old ways, believing in the illusion of the
me, the ego, as an entity, wanting to preserve it,
pampering its every move, and intellectually work
hard - investigating, discussing, reading books, tra-
velling around die world - so the truth becomes a
thorn and makes your life uncomfortable.
Intellectual enquiry is not difficult, verbal under-
standing is not difficult, the most difficult part is

81
living the truth you understand.
It is a tradition the world over to look upon
religion and spirituality, meditations and samadhi's
and satori's or transformations as a marvellous
escape from all manner of responsibility as an
individual, as a member of society, as a modier, as
a husband, as a wife. So talk about tantra-yoga,
mantra-yoga, hatha-yoga, different diets, talk
about group therapies, talk about techniques of con-
centration, meditation, and keep yourself engaged
widi them and let that be a shield against the
society in which you live. This is what the people
in the Eastern hemisphere have done with themsel-
ves. There is no reason for the 40% or 42% Indians
to live below the poverty line, except their callous-
ness to material life. "The world is an illusion, all
is Maya, the Atman, the Soul is the only reality",
so neglect if they work hard and if they do not ig-
nore the sacred material world around diem. Matter
is, after all, solidified energy and energies are
the vehicle for expressing the supreme intelligence.
Whether the people in India, Burma, Sri Lanka and
south-east Asian countries, in the name of religion
they have neglected the facts of their life and they
are paying a very heavy, high price for that cal-
lousness. So hundreds and thousands of monasteries,
temples, ashrams, hermits, recluses, sannyasins
living there and the starvation stricken exploited
society of millions on the other.
We are talking about world peace and psychic muta-
tion as the gateway to the world peace. If one
needs a companionship, if one would like to live
with a partner in life, a person may get married
or live together as man and woman, it's an entirely
personal matter, nothing to do with religion or
spirituality. A married person, a married couple,
doesn't become less sacred than a celibate. Renunci-
ation is the quality of consciousness, not wearing
some saffron coloured clotiies and robes.

82
7. MEDITATION

One is rather reluctant to use the word "meditation"

as it has been treated rather callously by the
human race during the last 50 years. It has been
abused, misused, used without a sense of responsibi-.
lity, recklessly. You might have noticed that one
hardly used the term 'meditation'. Let us listen very
carefiiUy.
By now we must have realised that listening is quite
a difficult task. While hearing the words if one is
busy comparing what is being said to what one has
known before, then the activity of comparison going
on simultaneously with the activity of hearing the
words, prevents the action of listening. Nothing
can be received because the energy is focused on
comparison.
If one is busy finding out whether what is being
said is acceptable or rejectable, consistent with
one's beliefs or inconsistent with them, then this
incessant activity of evaluation and forming a
value judgement about what is being heard prevents
communication. Listening to communications which
are not meant as propagation of any theory, which
are not aimed at convincing the listeners, of con-
verting them, requires the simplicity of recepti-
vity and humility.
I do not know if the people living in these parts
of the globe ever get a chance to go for walks
during torrential rains. We living in the tropical
countries very often have the privilege and the
great fun of getting drenched into torrential rains,
you just go out for the fun of it and you get
drenched to the skin, you get soaked in the rains.
While you are getting drenched by the rains you
do not argue inwardly what the rain-bath is going
to do to your health, how it is going to affect the
health. You are not busy evaluating, you just get
drenched. Or when you are sun-bathing you are not
calculating every second minute how far the sun-
shine has helped and revitalized your being. So
listening is quite an art and a creative action, it

83
is not only speaking that is a creative action, the
listening also is equally creative and when such
speaking and listening join hands, tiien communica-
tion takes place. It seems to me that meditation is
an alternative way of living, and alternative human
culture, nothing less than a culture of the human
race and a new dynamics for the human beings.
What goes on under the name of meditation the
world over is psycho-physical activity of concentra-
tion. You keep a picture or an imiage an idol of
your favourite god or goddess or the picture of
your self-inflicted master, guru, and you stare at
it wanting to get lost in it and they call it medita-
tion. You select, or someone else selects for you,
a combination of certain letters, call it a mantra,
as the easterners call it, you go on chanting it and
hypnotize yourself and spend hours or weeks or
months under the spell of that hypnotism and the
intoxication that it stimulates and you call it 'me-
ditation'. You go through certain postures prescribed
by tantra yoga for the sublimation of sex energy
and the experiences stimulated by those manipulated
postures combined widi pranayama you call tiiem
spiritual experiences, meditative experiences. Well
we will not go into the elaboration of all this
nonsense and idiocy that goes on in the world and
has gone on in the world under the name of medi-
tation.
We are going to look into the content of the word
meditation from quite a different approach and
angle, leaving all this twisting and distortions and
perversions aside. Let us look at meditation, the
deathless way of living, an alternative way of
living, a way of living where there is an unconditi-
onal freedom of the whole being, free from the
game of acceptance and rejection of die past, free
from the game of agreement and disagreement with
the ancestors.
We have been enquiring in the possibility of psychic
mutation and world peace. We have perceived that
the present way of living is based upon acquisi-
tion. We have been told and conditioned to acquire.

84
to own what we acquire, to possess what we have
owned, to protect it all our life, preserve it and
be vigilant for its continuity. Acquisition, owners-
hip, possession, preservation and vigilance for its
continuity is equated with the totality of a 100-
year life, which is sipposed to be the span, normal
span of human life.
Undoubtedly one has to indulge in the acquisitive
activity. You have to acquire knowledge in order
to live in a human society, you have to acquire
knowledge about the surroundings, the nature, the
climate, the flora, the fauna. You have to own a
house, an apartment or whatever you live in, you
have to have some food, some clothing, things of
personal use. The conditioning for an acquisitive
movement has a relevance to life.
But when the things are acquired: material things,
intellectual ideas, dieories, scientific knowledge,
technology, skills and cultivation of talents for
your fine arts, etc. what does one do with that
acquisition? Is it necessary to develop a psychology
of ownership after the acquisition? You hold die
things because you need them living in a society
and you use them. Acquisition is for utility, 't is
a physical necessity, as knowledge is a psychological
necessity. So the brain feels secure with the know-
ledge of the scientific gadgets you have to use,
theories that keep you informed about the economic
structure, laws of the country, the international
events, all this acquisition is for utilization.
Why should we be conditioned with the attitude of
ownership to these things? Those of you who are
fond of human history, might have noticed that
Marx and Engels, also Lenin had tried to tackle
this root cause of exploitation, the sense of own-
ership. When Marx wrote down that revolutionary
bible of Marxism or communism in 1840, the root
cause of violence and wars in the world is laid
very deep in the human psyche, in the sense of
ownership and sense of possession.
If the human beings are educated in the art of
acquiring according to their capacities physical

85
and intellectual and use those things as a necescity
for social living and if the sense of ownership and
possession is not glorified and sanctified by society,
then there would not be any corn^^tion. You trans-
fer that idea from material things and objects to
human beings and in human relationship; then you
find a partner of life and you begin to live toget-
her. Without your knowing you develop an attitude
of owning that individual, you imagine that you are
possessing that individual. So all psychological
suffering and misery, the jealousies, the doubts, the
suspicions, the pettinesses, the dependencies and
psychological dominations are nothing but the elabo-
ration of this root cause, this sense of owning and
possessing. You require relationship, you are a
social animal, you have the aesthetic sensitivity,
so you need companionship, sharing is the beauty
of life, so for sharing life together, the pains, the
pleasures, the odds of life, meeting die challenges,
it is a healthy and sane requirement of companion-
ship.
But instead of resulting in a healthy and sane com-
panionship based on friendship, respecting uncondi-
tional freedom of the otiier person, we imagine that
we possess each other, in marriage, out of marriage,
simple friendships, man-woman, woman-woman, man-
man, and the psychological misery begins.
Wherever there is curtailment of freedom, there is
exploitation, wherever there is curtailment of free-
dom, there is the injustice and the human psyche
without verbalization begins to suffer under the
burden of that exploitation.
So can we learn as a human race and help our
children to learn at schools and homes that though
acquisition of material objects and meeting human
beings and relating to them at a respectable distan-
ce of intimacy and living together, need not deve-
lop into a sense of owning and possessing. As indi-
vidually this is the cause of psychological suffering,
collectively this is the cause of all battles and
wars in the world, whether you own it on a natio-
nal level, a group level, organizational level, family

86
level, the quality of the attitude behind the clashes,
exploitations and violence is just the same.
It is the sense of, an attitude of owning and pos-
sessing which leads us to believe that a defence
mechanism must be built in the mind, we must know
how to react to specific situations, there must be
criteria and norms codified and transmitted into our
children and that is how patterns of reactions, neu-
ro-chemical reactions have been standardized,
organized and sanctified by the human race.
What is anger, but a neuro-chemical reaction to an
unpleasant situation, we don't question the validity
of that ugly annoyance and irritation, surging up
and building up in our system and we feel that gi-
ving an outlet to that pressure, neuro-chemical
pressure which you call anger, is sometiiing like
human nature which cannot be changed, and the an-
ger and the violence gets justified, a self-righteous-
ness comes about iL We fight wars, defensive wars,
individually and collectively, we are the world and
what happens in our lives happens on a global level
in what you call the world.
If we can find a clue to the ending of this psycho-
logical misery, suffering, aggression, exploitation
and violence in individual life, we have uncovered
the mystery of a peaceful way for the whole world
to live. Apart from us and our way of living the
network of interactions in our relationships, peace
cannot come into existence.
When the sense of owning and possessing is not
there, when the fear is not there of losing an indi-
vidual emotionally, losing a friend, or the partner
turning to another person, obviously there is re-
laxation in you. Your relationship is then a move-
ment of relaxation, you acquire things and you
utilize them, you use them wherever their utilizati-
on is relevant, but you do not carry mentally the
burden of responsibility of owning and possessing.
There is a lightness about it, otherwise our posses-
sions become our burdens that we carry till the last
moment of our life.
So please do see that though acquisitiveness is a

87
relevant activity and we have to help our children
to learn to acquire material things and psychological
knowledge, attain elegance and competence in hand-
ling the cerebral activity of knowing, retaining in
memory, reproducing when necessary, though all this
is necessary, the sense of ownership and possession
is not only irrelevant to the movement of life, but
it is the fundamental wrong turn that the human
civilization has taken. If that is to be left intact,
the human race may work for world peace another
hundred years and we will nowhere be nearer it
than we are today.
The crisis is in the quality of the human psyche,
the attitude to the movement of relationship, the
approach to human challenges, we leave them intact
in the hands of priests, religious teachers, and
those sannyasies and saints and what have you, we
leave the economic systems and political structu-
res in the hands of politicians and billions of us
inhabiting the globe live in a sense of helplessness,
helpless witnesses to the atrocities of the politician,
the industrialist, the military and the so-called
religious priest or teacher. And collectively we
indulge in self-pity and helplessness allowing all
manner of negative energies to darken our lives
and poison our perception.
Please do see the urgency of psychic mutation and
its relevance to world peace. When there is no
sense of being an owner as an entity and a sense
of possession, an attitude of possessiveness, what
happens to us in our daily living? E3ecause we are
not sharing theories, we are talking about an alter-
native way of living leading to the development of
an alternative culture for the whole human race.
We are talking about meditation as a new way of
living. Then all the acquisitions are purged of the
sting of ownership and possession, used and shared
freely, regulated by the laws of the society, the
country, the globe, the global government if and
when it comes into existence - and one does see
it round the comer, the dawn of the new century
shall see the formation of a global administration

88
and a global management of world resources. This
is not a prophecy; this is how one perceives it
coming, studying the world events, the political
and economic currents.
The human race cannot escape the compulsion it is
creating for itself. Does it not become possible
then in this inner freedom to look at death and
dying as the culmination of life and living, not
the pathetic tragic end towards which we are drag-
ging ourselves physically, but a marvellous culmina-
tion of the act of living and the movement of rela-
tionship which is living. Today death is a fearful
idea tiecause we are jolly well aware that in the
moment of death we are deprived of all ownership
and possessions. All the belongings are no more
there, I am snapped away from all what I have col-
lected, human beings around me, material objects
around me, the knowledge that I have collected,
in one moment a drastic stroke and there is an end
to all the sense of belonging, owning, possessing,
being somebody, isn't that of which we are
frightened?
We observe that that which is bom in space and
time emerges out of the infinity with a form, has
an ending which you call death. We see trees, we
see birds and animals, so the same thing is going
to happen to the human body, some moment it is
born and some moment it has to die. That does
not bother us.
What bothers us is the irrevocable separation from
one another. Now supposing we learn to live with-
out clinging to one another, if material acquisi-
tions do not corrupt the mind with the sense of
being owner of them but a trust in our hands on
behalf of the human society, then we would be
gratefiil" to die human civilization for having
developed science, technology, marvellous gadgets
for us, so many physical facilities for us. We would
be grateful to the society that has the transportati-
on, the means of communication, so we would use
whatever has been acquired with a sense of gratitu-
de. The austere lives of innumerable scientists

89
must have gone behind the state of nuclear science
and technology today, medicine, biology, hard
work behind the formulation of philosophies,
literature. Just because you pay some 10 dollars
and buy a book, it does not mean that you own
the book and you have bought it and therefore you
are not obliged to anyone. How could your money,
all the wealtii on the earth buy, if there were not
such things developied by the ancestors. The poetry,
the music that you were listening to, it's not one
individual's creation, it is the product of the whole
human race. So one cannot say ' I work eight hours
a day and therefore I get the payment and I buy
things, so why a sense of gratefulness?'
Gratefulness to the farmer, the industrialist, the
businessman, police who helps you, the government
that cooperates with yoa The whole attitude to
life changes as soon as the poison of ownership
and possession disappears and is completely wiped
out fi-om the psyche. A new psyche of cooperation
instead of competition and confrontation grows as
the children grow. You are rooting out the cause
of mistrust and distrust among human beings and
nations.
A person interested in meditation says whether
today, tomorrow or after fifty years, this body is
going to be dropped to the earth, buried, cremated,
thrown into the ocean, so why not from today, why
not live from this day, this moment, with a new
approach of non-ownership and non-possession?
If this point is clear, would you allow me to look
at this issue of meditation. We have seen the social
and the global aspect of the content of meditation,
let us probe a little further and go a little deeper.
We have seen during the last few days, haven't we,
that life is measurement free, life is not our
concept about life, divinity is not our word 'god'
or the concept about divinity that we have chiselled
out. It has existed and so shall it exist, entirely
free of all our words, concepts, ideas, symbols,
it's independent of all that. Our activity has grafted
a conceptual world on the perceptual reality for us.

90
it is in our brain, it is in the human race and
genes.
But reality as it is, the life that exists as it is is
concept free, measurement free, symbol free. If at
all you have to verbalize about it, you might call
it an 'isness' which is immune from any kind of
destruction, what 'is' cannot be destroyed.
The forms decay, get buried or cremated and there-
fore they change, the substance changes and again
comes back to the human form or the animal form.
From the dust to which it gets reduced one day,
the ashes thrown into the rivers, or the bodies
buried into the earth, become the source of new
creations, it's a cycle, life knows no destruction.
We the human beings in the world that we have
created, we hurt, we kill, we murder. There is
nothing like a murder in life as it is. When a tiger
pounces upon its prey, it is not out to murder
someone, it satisfies its hunger, no motivation to
kill.
Outside of human civilization, human culture and
of man-made world and structure, there is nodiing
like destruction. There are changes in the forms
that the substance of life takes and the dance of
emergence of forms and merging back of forms goes
on. So we are living on one level in the man-made
world, where knowledge, acquisition, utilization
etc., is necessary, and the man-made world is sur-
rounded by the existence, by the coanic reality,
by the life which is thought-free, concept-free,
measurement-free and therefore it is timeless.
Eternity is nothing but timelessness, not a category
hanging over somewhere in the so-called heavens
above the eardi, it's here, now, between you and
me, the isness of life which is free of measure-
ments, (jannot be described in terms of 'was', 'is',
and 'shall be' or 'shall not be'. It's an 'isness'
which defies any other description.
When you and I live in the man-made world which
you call 'daily living' and for me it is the only
time to live, either you live or you miss it, but
what you call the moment, what you call the 'pre-

91
sent', what you call the 'now' and 'here' is the
eternity, the infinity, the timelessness, and the
non-verbalizable unknowable, unnameable divinity.
You live in it physically, psycholically, you live in
it and as soon as that act of living in a particular
relationship is gone through, while you were going
through it and at the end of it a sense of pleasure
or pain might be registered by the body, an aesthe-
tical appreciation, an intellectual assessment might
take place at the end of it.
Is it necessary to allow the aesthetical sense of
appreciation to grow into a positive like or a
negative dislike? Registering of an aesthetic appre-
ciation is an involuntary movement, you go through
it as a cultured person, but the habit of creating
a like or a dislike out of the agreeability of
pleasure and aesthetical agreeability of appreciation,
forming a like and a dislike, you allow the like to
crystallize and it becomes a preference, you allow
the dislike to continue and it becomes a prejudice.
So what was a momentary like or dislike grows into
formation of a prference and prejudice, which have
a continuity as a tendency.
Do you see what screens we go on creating between
the 'isness' of life and ourselves? And the sense
of preference, which pleases you, creates an attitu-
de of clinging to it, attachment, or a bitterness,
a callousness towards what you call the prejudice.
When in the next moment you are with the reality
of life, you have allowed the action to leave the
residue as pain and pleasure, the residue as like
and dislike, the residue as a preference, prejudices.
Then you form a value judgement based on the pre-
ference or prejudice, there can be intellectual pre-
ferences, prejudices, there can be emotional prejudi-
ces and preferences, so you build up a value judge-
ment this person is good, this is bad, a hindu value
judgement, a Christian value judgement, a Muslim,
a communist, collective value judgements, individual
value judgements. That's why one calls it a self-
inflicted misery and self-inflicted suffering. Suppos-
ing you realize that, life is only an 'isnss', there

92
is no continuity in it, what has happened has
happened, at this moment, here, now, in this act
of relationship, stretching what has happened
psychologically widi the idea of time and conferring
a sense of continuity to it, is the root of all
suffering and misery.
Meditation is the ending of psychological suffering,
you live and you die to it immediately. You know
what is dying? Not allowing any residue to remain
behind is the content of dying. You live in what
you call the moment and you allow the matter to
end there. No memory created, an alternative way
of living.
You are working in an office, dealing with matters,
executive matters, you are working in a family
situation, you have to use your memory and know-
ledge for buying groceries, taking care of the
house, taking care of the school, you have to use
memory there, the factual memory.
But the ending of psychological memory is die
essence of meditative way of living. So your intel-
ligence is ever virgin, ever green, ever fresh to
meet the challenges of life. You don't become a
piece of inertia, you feel the pleasure, you do
feel the pain and if there is injustice you resist
it, i f it is a system based on exploitation, you
fight against it, but the psyche does not get bur-
dened with anger, hatred, bitterness, self-pity,
you do it because it is needed to be done, that is
to say the movement of relationship does not stimu-
late any neuro-chemical inbalance in you.
Meditation is an alternative way of living where
relationships are movements of inner equipoise,
inner relaxation. When there is no memory created
and built up, no psychic knots are woven out of
preference, prejudice, theories, conclusions etc.,
there is a magnificent silence within, relaxation is
the emptiness of space of silence widiin you.
Are you aware that the physicists today are playing
around with the emptiness of space, exploring the
energies contained in the emptiness of space and
finding out how innumerable universes have explo-

93
ded out of the compressed emptiness. That was
life. They say cosmos is an explosion of emptiness.
The space which you call emptiness, which we
would call a wholeness, contains innumerable ener-
gies, the energies which the htman race has tapped,
explored and channellized up to now, are not even
a fraction of the organistic wholeness of life. So
you live and you die to what has happened in that
moment, in that interaction between the eternity
and yourself, interaction between die energies.
You do not impose a sense of continuity, sequence,
cause-effect relationship, which has a relevance in
the man-made world and the structures, but none
whatsoever in human relationships.
You meet human beings not out of habit, you do
not get used to human beings around you, saying
" I know her, I know him", or "he is like that and
she is like this", holding of value judgements about
one another and trying to manipulate your behavi-
our according to your value judgements about
others, isn't that the source of clashes, violence
and wars? So we have to explore if it is possible,
and one begs to share with you that it seems to
be possible, one says it seems to be possible be-
cause one has lived that way. Not making a genera-
lized theory about it, but as a perception, as shar-
ing of flesh and blood with you. It seems to be
possible to live entirely free of psychological me-
mory and therefore ever vital, ever fresh.
Relationships do not wear you out then; it is the
storing of reactions, it is the burden of preferences
and prejudices, it is the weight that you carry of
conclusions, theories, norms and criteria that
exhausts you, wears you down. When you walk on
the sea shore, you go for walks in the woods, or
climb the mountains, though the body gets exhau-
sted, you are revitalized, refreshed in that commu-
nion. Hunan relationships can result in such com-
munion and give you the feed-back of energy, keep
you vital, energetic, fresh, as much as the commu-
nion with nature can do.
May I clarify one more point, that this does not

94
mean that there will be no hurts and pains. As
there is a physical pain when a thorn pricks, there
will be pain inwardly and a sense of hurt, you feel
the hurt like the prick, but you don't convert it
into an issue: I have been hurt! You do not begin
to own it as an experience of hurt. It was an event
of hurt, but we convert the events into personal
experiences and when we get together with our
friends we go on talking about how ' I have suffe-
red, how she hurts you and he offended you'. We
play with our memories even when we are alone,
and the self-pity created out of all that sense of
hurt and pain. Isn't it a wastefii way of living?
As there would be smiles, and big grins from ear
to ear, there might be tears, the hurt, the pain,
ti-ie agony. But all die pain, the agony, the hurt,
create the energy of deep sorrow that the htman
minds work that way, that the human psyche suffers
from imbalances from moment to moment. The hu-
man race has not learned instead of 20th century,
or the billions of years, to move in relationship
widiout getting imbalanced inwardly. What's the
use of having all the wealth of the world at your
feet, if every moment, every relationship disturbs
you, qpsets you, either stimulates pride, vanity, or
stimulates self-pity and depression? What's the use
of all the knowledge, and the "so-called wisdom"?
Because life is living. In isolation there is no life,
there may be physical survival, but not the perfume
of life, and not the vibration of the divinity
contained and concealed in us.
Meditation is living and dying to what has happened
psychologically and as there is no accumulation of
possessions, ownership, clinging to objects and
individuals, there is no fear of separation. Deatfi
as an idea of irrevocable separation is frightening,
but a meditative way of living has helped us to live
at a different level of culture. You never suffer
from the sense of ' I am somebody' and ' I belong
to a country, to religion, to a community', you have
a sense of belonging to the whole life or the sense
of inner silence or emptiness.

95
The sense of all-ness, which is wholeness, or the
sense of nobody-ness which is emptiness, describe
it either way, any way that you like, that is the
content of a mutated psyche, which lives meditati-
vely thereafter.
Not the primitivity of a savage, not the sophistica-
tion of the thought-structure, but the refinement,
the purification through die inner freedom of
silence. Obviously thereafter the ending of the
body may come when it has to come. We are not
haunted by that idea, we are busy with living.
And when the moment of the ending of the body
comes, there is the final act of living: dying-
the culmination of all living, graciously, without
any psychological suffering at all; there might be
physical suffering, one does not know. The physical
pain if there is a disease in the body, the body
might twitch and the pain may be registered and
there might be groaning or a scream might escape,
all that on the physical level might happen, but
inwardly there is no sense of misery, suffering,
self-pity and no inclination to cling to the body
when the moment for departure comes.
Meditation is a deathless way of living, you have
already died: what is death going to take away
from you? There is no sense of identification, so
no possibility of a sense of separation. You live
in society, you live in families, you enjoy company,
there is care, concern, love, compassion, and yet
not owning or possessing, not clinging to it, not
holding on to it. You hold on till it is necessary
and you release the hold when the moment comes
as naturally as an autumn leaf drops away soundles-
sly from the tree to the earth.
Dying is the culmination of living, not an end.

96
Pii)lications by Vimala Thakar

On an eternal voyage 1966 6th printing

Mutation of Mind 1966 3rd printing
Silence in action 1968 4th printing
Towards Total Transformation 1970
Nijmegen University Talks 1970
2nd Nijmegen University Talks 1972
Banaras University Talks 1972
Meditation - A way of life 1985 (3rd extensive
re-edition)
A Challenge to Youtii 1974
Blossoms of Friendship
Beyond Awareness (Bilthoven-Holland Talks 1974)
Five Talks given at Claremont, California 1974
The Mystery of Silence 2nd edition
Life as Yoga
Talks in Auso-alia 1977
The Eloquence of living
Songs of Yearning (a re-edition with illustrations
of "Life and Uving")
Spirituality and Social Action
Life is to be related 2nd edition
The Benediction of being alive 2nd edition
Vimalaji on extensive Self-Education 1987
6di Talk in Hoeven 1987 (Holland), English and
Esperanto
Life is Movement, 1988
Exploring Freedom, 1988

"CONTACT widi Vimala Thakar", Magazine, twice

a year

"THE INVINCIBLE", Magazine

Dutsch Language:
Toespraken Nijmeegse Universiteit 1970
Toespraken Nijmeegse Universiteit II, 1972
Dynamische Stilte, 1974
De dringende noodzaak tot zelfontdekking en het
Geheim van de Stilte
Het leven staat niet stil
Fear and die urge for security and tiie addiction
to audiority cannot be eliminated from the consci-
ousness with help of a new piece of knowledge, a
new code of conduct, new philosophies, new theo-
ries. What does this mean? It means, that the
movement of naming and identifying, integrating,
the whole panorama of mental activity, has no
relevance when we want to face the challenge.
To recognize, to realize that knowledge which has
been a great help for physical security, is perhaps
the greatest obstacle in the realm of psychological
relationships and peace is a question of relationship,
peace is not a problem of treaties between nations.
It's only a new dynamics of human relationships
that might bring forth what you call world peace,
a new dimension and content to consciousness and
a new dynamics of relationship. They are inevitable
if we are really genuinely concerned to have world
peace. To arrive at this point of recognition of
the facts without a sense of frustration, without
a sense of depression, without a sense of helpless-
ness, seems to be necessary.

This is the special issue nr. 27 of the magazine

"CONTACT with V I M A L A THAKAR", April 1990.

8 6 3 - 4 / 9 0 Ethnet Offset bv - Hilversum

si ence in action

V I M A L A THAKAR
Silence in action
VIMALA THAKAR

Silence in action

Published by
Bookfund Vimala Thakar
Holland

Holland / summer '86

All rights reserved by Mrs. E.A.M. Frankena-Garaets
Fourth Edition Summer 1986.
Book-design Maarien Houtman GKf
 Contents

1 The meditative way, page 7

(Two td\s given in Bilthoven)

2 Questions and answers, page 45

3 Selfeducation, page 74
CHotes for personal study)
The meditative way
1st Talk in Bilthoven

It may sound rather strange and incredible to the

ears of those who have traditionally believed
themselves to be human beings; that the human
being is yet to be bom.
The human animal has inhabited the earth for
innumerable centuries' two million years' but out
of the human animal the totally integrated,
harmoniously developed human being is yet to be
born.
This basic fact is not appreciated by us when we
think about the problems with which we are
surrounded. Whether the problems are pohtical,
economic, social, racial or what you will, they exist,
because the curse of fragmentation is upon us.
Fragmentation, not outside us, but within us.
A total perspective cannot be had by an individual
who hves in fragments in himself. It is necessary
that human individuals become whole in themselves
first. Unless that wholeness is arrived at, the per'
spective is bound to be fragmentary. A n d the
fragmentary perspective, focused on the fragment
of a problem, creates a fragmentary solution in

9
which man the world over engages his attention,
and focuses his energy.
M y friends, the fundamental challenge is of going
through revolution oneself and allowing a human
being to be bom within oneself. W e need not go
into the details of how for the last two centuries
man has been playing with various aspects of in'
dividual and so'called collective life; trying to de'
velop the physiological organism; trying to refine
and cultivate the psychological organism; trying to
play with the occult powers; trying to play with
so'called transcendental experiences; trying to create
social, economic and pohtical orders, and through
them to arrive at the creation of a new human
being and a human society. W e need not go into
all the efforts that man has gone through in the
so'called free, non'communist world and the com'
munist world. The results, the facts with which
we have to live today are self'evident.
A s an individual, man is unhappy. Collectively he
is unhappy; he has not overcome the discriminations
between races, colours, creeds, ideologies, exclusive
loyalties of religions and so on.
I believe that a handful of us sitting in this room,
are earnestly interested in finding out what can
be done in our own lives; we have come here this
beautiful afternoon, not to indulge in any academic,
intellectual or theoretical discussions, but we have
come, because we appreciate the fact that some
thing has got to be done with our whole psyche.

10
A movement in the total human consciousness is
necessary. Not the conscious understanding the
subconscious, and exploring the unconscious; c r c
ating adjustments, reforms and patchworks in the
subconscious or the unconscious. Not that! The
nineteenth'centuryhuman beings have been playing
with that, with psychology, psychctherapy,
psychoanalysis, psychiatry, you know, the whole
business.
Something has got to be done with the whole psy
chological structure of the human race, which seems
to have arrived at a saturation'point; which seems
to have arrived at a blind alley, from where it is
not finding its way ahead.
So the challenge is of total transformation in the
human psyche. It is a crisis in the psyche. It is a
crisis in the consciousness and not in the material,
economic or pohtical hfe. A l l collective problems
are extensions and projections of individual pro'
blems. No collective problem, no pohtical, economic
or social problem exists independently of the in'
dividual. It is a creation of the individual; a re'
flection of his attitudes and approaches; projections
of his evaluation of life; extensions of his passions
and urges. This fact must be appreciated before we
proceed; otherwise we will divide the individual
from the collective life; we will divide the indi'
vidual problem from the world'problem and
imagine a dichotomy between the two, we will
find out separate ways of tackling the social

11
problem from those of tackling the individual
problem; a set of values for one and another set
of values for another. A n d then create a tension
between the two sets. A l l that division and
bifurcation, all that dichotomy and conflict is un'
warranted, unscientific, and undesirable. The
individual is the reality. Social, economic, and
political relationships are the result of the texture
of an individual's relationships with his sur'
roundings.
T o reah^e this is the beginning of religion. M y
relationship with my body, mind, with the things
that I am using, with the surroundings in which I
am living, with the people who come across my
hfe, goes to create the social fabric. So all the
enthusiastic eagerness and anxiety for social r e
forms and social revolution, will have to be directed
back to one's own life. That is why we say that it
is a crisis in the human psyche. It is a crisis in total
human consciousness and some movement has got
to be created there. The totality of human
consciousness has got to move.
Now how does it happen?
For the study of human mind, for the convenience
of verbal study, we divide it into conscious, sub
conscious and unconscious. Not that there are such
watertight compartments in the human conscious'
ness. Not at all; it is one whole. But we divide it.
And we thought that all the contradictions and
conflicts within us, could be resolved with the help

12
of the conscious mind, brain, memory, that is with
the help of the known. Weather in the East or in
the West the discovery of truth, personal discovery
of freedom, of the meaning of hfe, has been treated
as the realm of the conscious mind. It has been
looked upon as something which can be acquired,
owned, possessed, experienced, and retained by the
conscious mind. And this conscious mind in its turn
has to be in tune with the subconscious. It has to
resolve the conflicts and tensions in the sub'
conscious. That is what we have been thinking
about. And man has failed on both fronts. The
subconscious along with its conflicts and tensions
cannot be suppressed. They cannot be wished
away; they cannot be denied.
You cannot repress and suppress the subconscious.
It has the tremendous momentum of the whole
human race. Your conscious mind has not got the
strength and the momentum, to deal with the sub'
conscious. A l l efforts to discipline the subconscious,
to control, to regulate, to shape the urges, passions,
and ambitions; all the efforts at controlling,
directing, and regulating, have not helped man to
arrive at the state of his being in which there
would be total relaxation; a state of his being in
which he would act out of relaxation, in which his
hfe would be a spontaneous, graceful movement of
relaxation and not of effort.
A s there are going to be only two talks and as we
have to cover a vast ground, we are deahng with

13
the basic points. I cannot go into the details of how
man has tried to control, regulate and discipline
the subconscious. Various patterns of disciplines
have come into existence. The Hindus have their
course of conduct and their pattern of disciplining
the subconscious. The Buddhists have their own;
the Catholics have their own; the Sufi, the Muslims
have their own pattern of disciplining the
conscious; and through the conscious the sub'
conscious. A s every disciphne cultivates power,
every discipline gives a sharpness to human talents,
such disciplined minds the world over, have
manifested tremendous powers; the so-called occult
powers; transcendental powers and what not. But
Truth has nothing to do with power. The beauty
of truth is: it just is.
So, disciplines have manifested the hidden powers
of the conscious and the subconscious. Disciplines
have helped the hidden powers of the physical
organism also, to get manifested. For example, the
muscular, the nervous and the glandular system of
a yogi, will manifest a hundred times more power
than that of the ordinary man. Physical and
psychological discipline has its own relative utility
in human relationships. Man has seen it. But we
have not even touched the fringe, the lace of the
problem, the problem of total transformation in
the psyche.
Disciplines cannot create that transformation. They
are concerned with changing the form; changing

14
some qualities in the mutant. Now qualitative
reformation is not transformation. Let me give you
an example. If through discipline, my physical
system works much better than yours, as a human
being I have been more honest to my body, to that
extent it is something creditable, but that has
nothing to do with the understanding of what life
is in its totality. It is still only one part of life that
I have understood. If through discipline I develop
and cultivate mental powers, psychological or
psychic powers, I have been more honest to the
beautiful complex instrument, the mind, the brain,
while others have not been really loyal to their
instrument; they have not got acquainted with it;
they have not probed and explored the possibilities,
the potentiahties of that instrument. They have not
used it to its best capacity. I use the mind to its
maximum capacity and you do not use it. That is
the difference.
Persons who discipline, may sharpen the powers,
the talents, but manifestation of psychological or
physiological powers is not spirituality; is not
freedom; it is not hberation. W e have said that
man has failed on both fronts. This was one front
that the speaker had in mind.
The second front is treating truth or reality as an
object to be acquired by the mind. After disciplin'
ing the body and the mind, man thought 'now with
this beautiful instrument, refined and cultivated,
I am going to acquire the meaning of hfe. I am

15
going to acquire the experience of reahty, of truth.
I am going to acquire hberation, Nirvana, moksha,
satori, and what you will. I am going to acquire it
through the use of this mind which is beautifully
refined, and sensitivised.'
Unfortunately life defies acquisition; the beauty of
freedom, the grace of liberation is that, it cannot
be acquired; it cannot be bought; it cannot be
purchased by giving any currency whatsoever;
even if you give the currency of visions and trans'
cendental experiences. That currency is absolutely
irrelevant to the realm of freedom. The speaker
would like to emphasize this point, because the
temptation to acquire, in the invisible and subtle
realm of consciousness, is much more powerful
than the temptation to acquisitions in the material
or economic world. Man has seen the hmits of
sensual pleasure. The young generation tcday,
the world over, is running after the invisible world,
imagining that freedom can be acquired. They are
trying to expand consciousness through drugs,
and mantras. For them Truth is still something to
be acquired, to be owned, and be experienced.
Truth can never be experienced. Experiencing is a
mental action. For experiencing you need an experi'
encer and something to be experienced. You need
the mind, which experiences, through the sense
organs, or without the help of the sense'organs.
Sense'organs are not indispensable means of
experience.

16
I hope, those who are sitting in this room know
that extra'sensory perception, claipaudience and
clairvoyance are very ordinary and elementary
things in the psychic world. They are possible.
They are there, for one who wants to see them.
But freedom or total transformation cannot be had
through these powers of the mind. That is the only
thing the speaker would Hke to emphasize this
afternoon.
That is not the way. Man has tried. A l l efforts to
acquire freedom have resulted in the intoxication
of visions and experiences. And man gets stuck up
in them. Then I say: 'my pattern of experiencing
is superior to yours', and you say your pattern of
transcendental experience is superior to that of
some one else. That is going on in the world.
Dozens of yogis are wandering over the world,
talking of freedom and hberation, as if it can be
achieved by the mind; this petty httle mind, im'
prisoned in the experiences of the individual on
the animal level; the petty httle human mind which
is a solidification of knowledge and experience.
Whatever it may do. Reality is not within the
reach of such human mind. If truth and hberty
cannot be acquired; if total transformation is not
a mental activity; if it is not an act of the will;
if it cannot be had through disciplining the sub'
conscious and unconscious, or creating a harmony
between them, then is there a way out? Can there
be a wayout of the stalemate? That is the problem.

17
 It seems that there is a wayout. Not the way of
acquisition and possession, nor the way of sup^
pression and repression. But the way of medi'
tation.
And we are here tcday and tcmorrow to explore
the possibility of the meditative way. I may be
wrong when I say it is so. I am sharing with you
what I see; sharing with you, what has taken place
in my life; what has been witnessed by me. If one
person can be a witness to that phenomenon within
himself or herself, does it not indicate that all
humanity is capable of going through that? A s far
as this way is concerned, the speaker would like
to call it the meditative way.
Verbal communication is very imperfect. Words
are quite useful, when you are using them for
science and technology; when you have to use them
in the realm of psychology, literature, and music.
But the dimension of hfe which we are going to
explore to'day and tO'morrow is such, that all the
words in all the languages may prove inadequate
and imperfect.
Taking into consideration the limitation of verbal
communication, we are going to go through it.
Meditation is a way of life. It is not an act of the
wiU; it is not a mental action. You cannot sit down
and say: ' I am going to meditate for one hour.'
You can concentrate. Concentration is a mental
activity. You know what concentration is, of
course: focusing one's attention on one point; to

18
the exclusion of the rest of life; that is concen'
tration. Concentration is an exclusive activity.
Meditation, on the other hand is all'inclusive
attention.
You know, you have to be present in your totality
when attention takes place. You cannot say: ' I am
attending to'. You can do something only on the
level of the mind. A s soon as the totality of your
being starts to operate, then things begin to happen
by themselves. So meditation is a state of being.
That is why I say, the meditating way could be
the way-out. Not living through the mind; not
getting related to Ufe through the mind, which has
only one groove to act. You know how the mind
or the brain operates. The brain, the mind, has one
determined specified channel of operating. Your
sense-organs come into contact with something
outside you; the sensation is received, carried over
to the brain; the brain interprets the sensation
according to its own conditioning. A Hindu, bom
in India, has got a pattern of conditioning. The
brain refers to that. A n Arab, living in the Middle-
East, has a different pattern of conditioning al-
together. So the same sensation will be interpreted
perhaps by the Arab or the Israeli in the Middle-
East in quite a different way. Come still westward.
Christians will have a pattern of conditioning the
brain and the mind through the centuries; so the
same facts, the same sensations will not only be
interpreted but responded to, in still another way.

19
Go to Eastern Europe. The pattern and con'
ditioning in the sccalled communist countries is
entirely different. So the same fact and the same
sensation received by a die'hard communist will be
interpreted and responded to in still another way.
So we have a variety of patterns of conditioning,
a variety of patterns of reactions and responses,
conscious and involuntary reflexes.
Mind has no other way but this. Sensations are
received, interpreted according to the pattern of
conditioning and the response is evoked. That is
how we behave.
Certain patterns have become so one with us, they
are ingrained, incorporated in our blood, that we
do not have to use the conscious mind, you know,
the impulses, the involuntary reflexes. So the
response comes even without the intervention of
the conscious mind. The subconscious comes into
play and you respond. You do not stop to think
'I will get angry' and then ' I will respond according
to the anger'. No! Anger is there. Out of your suly
conscious, the momentum of anger bursts out. So,
mind cannot but operate through this one groove,
reception of sensation; interpretation according to
the memory; and approximation of the response
to it. You see, this is quite simple, quite clear.
Now, when the mind is acting, it is not the totality
of our being that is acting. You must have seen
it in your daily hfe, many times. When you react,
your intellect tells you that this response is not

20
justified. One part of your mind responds and the
other part of your mind says *No this is not
justified; this is not desirable'. Sometimes the
intellect is obeyed by the other part of the mind,
and sometimes the intellect becomes a slave to the
momentum of the impulses, urges and ambitions.
The voice of the intellect is stifled. It is strangled.
That is how it goes on. Whether it is wearing a
summerdress, going to the hairdresser's, or going for
a vacation. It always comes out of one fragment of
your personality and not out of the totality.
The meditative way involves the totality of being
in every response to every movement of life within
you and without you. For the totality of your being
to come into operation, appreciation of the fact
must be there that 'mind is only a part of my being,
and not the totality'. Secondly, there should be
appreciation of the fact that there are other ways
of responding than through the mind. Thirdly, it
should be understood very clearly that silence does
not mean void or emptiness; that silence does not
imply paralysis of action. Appreciation of this fact
that silence of mind is a dimension of hfe which
has its own momentum, should be there.
The speaker would like to emphasize this point,
because man has tried to silence the mind through
violence. Forcibly silencing the mind is not arriving
at real silence. You know, if I chant, repeat certain
words, and allow the bicchemical effect of sound'
vibrations to act upon me, an artificial state of

21
peace can be created. If I take drugs, like L.S.D.,
psilocybine or mescaline, a temporal expansion of
the consciousness takes place; an artificial state is
created; it is stimulated. You can stimulate such
artificial states of your being. I am not referring to
that. Silence arrived at through violence, suffc
cation or suppression, is not silence.
Let the mind be, healthy, strong, rich with all its
capacities, and yet let it be silent. That is hving
silence. Silence of the totaHty of mind is a di'
mension of life which is not yet explored by us.
This factor should be appreciated. I can assure you
that silence is a hundred times more powerful and
dynamic than eloquence; than all the languages of
the world put together. The momentum of silence
is tremendous. You have split the atom and found
out the power contained in it. The explosion of
silence, when it takes place within a human being,
brings about a radical revolution.
I will not take your time in describing to you a n y
thing from books or in narrating to you things that
one has heard. I am not interested in that nonsense.
I am sharing with you the lifeblood; sharing with
you that which has happened; which can happen;
which does happen.
W e are going to go into what meditation is and
the totahty of meditative way of life tO'morrow.
But tO'day was the day to introduce the subject.
So we will end this afternoon's talk with the last
point: that silence of the total human mind does

22
not result in paralysis of action; does not result in
withdrawing from the active world; does not result
in benumbing any of your capacities. O n the other
hand silence of total mind sharpens your whole
being; every pore of being becomes active. That is
why the totality of being coming into operation
and moving with the movement of life is a tre-
mendous event. Every movement creates its
change. Students of physics and nuclear physics
know it. Every movement of an atom creates a
qualitative change in the matter of which it is
composed.
When the total mind becomes silent, that silence
permeates the whole being; you know what
permeation of silence in the being is. Permeating of
silence in the totahty of our being, is awareness.
W e have no motives. W e have no aims; nothing to
acquire, and nothing to save; so the defence-
mechanism is not working. The totality of your
being becomes aware of everything that goes on
within and without you, right from the toes to the
head. So, you become movement of awareness in
flesh and bone. Oh the beauty of it, if one could
just describe it! W e will go into it to-morrow.
W e started by saying that man has not been able
to resolve the problems of the individual and the
so-called collective hfe, because the earth is in-
habited by human animals and not by human
beings yet. A human being is yet to be bom. A n d
the challenge is: 'Am I wilUng to let the new

23
human being get born in me? A m I wiUing to go
through such a radical revolution, that I will be
bom anew?'
That is the challenge. The challenge is the total
transformation of the human consciousness. W e
said that man has dealt with problems fragmen'
tarily. W e proceeded to say that truth and libera'
tion, peace and freedom have been treated as
objects to be acquired and experienced by the mind.
For such an experience which was called the
rehgious experience, it was thought necessary to
deal with the subconscious and discipUne it. Man
tried it; it has not helped him to be free. Man tried
to acquire Tmth; to experience truth and
liberty.
Those efforts have not helped him. Is the youth of
to-day willing to explore the possibiUty of a third
way of dealing with the problem? Is there a way
at all? If there is, what can it be? A n d the speaker,
taking you into her confidence, says that there is
a third way. The way is of meditation. Meditation
is a way of hfe.
W e went into it. Discriminating meditation from
concentration and calling it an all'inclusive at'
tention, a state of being in which there is all'
inclusive attention every moment.

24
2nd Talk in Bilthoven

By now we are aware of the urgency of a radical,

total revolution, for getting free of all the tension,
conflicts and contradictions involved in hfe.
Reahzing the urgency, imphes understanding of the
situation, non'emotionally and non-intellectually.
It is very important to feel the urgency of a total
revolution with your whole being.
If the appreciation is intellectual or emotional, it
may lead one astray. If the necessity of a total
revolution is only intellectually appreciated, it be'
comes an idea, that the revolution is necessary. It
becomes a concept. A n d one hkes to find out
another idea to get rid of it. Intellectual inquiry
most often leads us to a search of new theories,
new ideas and new ideologies. If there is only an
emotional approach to the problem of total revc
lution, it may lead one in search of a new pattern
of behaviour; so it is extremely important that one
understands this problem of revolution in a non'
intellectual way; a non'emotional way; not getting
excited about it; not getting tense about it; not
getting intellectually stimulated and wander over

25
 the globe to find out some new theory or some new
way of life.
A non'intellectual and a non'emotional apprecia'
tion of the situation, is what I mean by urgency.
It is to reahze that the total revolution has got to
come in my life, tO'day, now, this hour, this minute.
Do you know what happens if the urgency is
reahzed with your whole being ' with the mind,
the brain, the nervous system and so on? Such a
reahzation eliminates the time'factor from your
consciousness. Otherwise you get involved in the
time'factor and say, 'yes, a revolution is necessary,
so let me find out a new way; let me find out a
new theory and I will gradually proceed towards
it'. It is only reahzation of urgency which elimi'
nates the time'factor. A n d unless the time'factor
is ehminated from consciousness, one cannot get
free from the habit of postponement.
Man does not postpone, satisfying and gratifying
the physical needs; hunger has got to be satisfied;
when you feel sleepy you have got to go to bed and
sleep. If you are thirsty you have to quench your
thirst with water. But about psychological problems,
the centuries bygone have taught man, have
conditioned him and he goes on postponing. If
there is fear, he says, 'yes, I will conquer the fear
gradually'. If there is violence in him he says, *yes,
I win overcome violence slowly, through some
technique, some discipline, some method.' This
postponement is nothing but a process of slow

26
suicide. Postponement of action is the malady of
human consciousness as far as the psychological
problems are concerned.
With the help of science and technology, man has
got over the habit of postponing physiological
problems; medicine and biology are helping him
to overcome physical pain, disease and illnesses.
He has learned that. But as regards psychological
problems, man has yet to learn. He has yet to get
free of this habit of postponing, of escaping into
some network of ideas, theories, and habit'pattems.
In spite of all the teachers and saviours, all rehgions
and spiritual sects and patterns of disciplining, man
is still at war with himself. The human heart is a
battleground of desires, passions, contradictions
and tensions. It is this war that we are waging
within ourselves, which has got to stop first.
The external wars are but the projections and
extensions of this internal war going on within us.
W e carry the seed of global violence within us; we
carry the seed of racial hatred and bitterness within
us. You know, the consciousness to'day is a soil for
all the misery and sorrow. So it is essential that we
do not shp into networks of escapes, provided to us
by religions, ideologies and theories. Unless we feel
the urgency of the problem; unless we realize the
gravity of this whole global, human malady; of the
diseased human consciousness the world over;
unless you feel it as you feel the physical pain in
your toe; unless you feel it as real as that, the

27
dimension of urgency will not function. Realizing
the urgency of the problem awakens passion and
intensity within you; an intensity which is not
wiUing to wait for another day, another week,
another month or another year. It activates every
pore of your being this moment. W e , the handful
sitting in this room, if at least we could realize
the gravity of the situation and feel the urgency,
as real to us as some personal physical pain, then
something might begin to work.
The non'intellectual and non-emotional approach
is the total approach. W e have seen yesterday that
the human psyche, as it is to-day, and as it has been
conditioned through centuries, is not going to solve
the problem. If we have really seen it, then, another
thing results out of it, not intellectually, but
factually moving within ourselves. If we have
really seen that the human consciousness, the mind,
the brain, the conscious, the subconscious, the un¬
conscious, the whole thing, is not going to help
solve the problem, then what can be the result of
such understanding? Awareness of the fact that
the human psyche is conditioned; that it is unable
to solve the problem; that it is not equal to the
job - what does such understanding result into? It
results into a glorious freedom. Such understanding
results in a state of being, where you are not
committed to any idea, any theory, any rehgion,
any nationahty or any state. It results in a state of
non-commitment, a state of non-identification.

28
To'day when we sit to inquire' we really are not
free to enquire ' we are fettered, we have our
moorings in some philosophy, theology, ideology,
some disciphne, some way, determined for us by
some teachers, saviours, or scriptures. You know,
the whole business. W e are not free to inquire.
Our inquiry itself is conditioned by the society in
which we have been brought up. Inquiry becomes
an extension of the conditioning in which we have
been brought up. The moment we see this simple
truth we do not identify ourselves anymore with
what we have been taught.
In other words, we unlearn the whole thing. W e
are living tcday in a state of self'hypnosis. W e feel
that we, as we are tO'day, the mind as it is tcday,
can inquire; that the known which has cultivated
the mind, is going to take us to the realm of the
unknown. W e are going to climb the mountaintop
with all the burden of the knowledge and the
experience. This is the state of self'hypnosis. A n d
such a mind wants to inquire. Obviously inquiry
does not take place. It is only a motive of search.
It is seeking to project what it has learned and
translate it into relationship. That is not inquiry.
The moment one sees that the psyche is not going to
help solve the problem, a state of non'identification
with the known comes into existence.
Freedom is nothing but a state of non'identification.
It is a state of non'commitment. When I do not
inquire as a Hindu, a Christian, a Theosophist, as

29
a Krishnamurtiite; as a Dutch, a white, a coloured
or as a negro, then real inquiry takes place. If we
probe into our hearts, we will see that from
morning tiU night our behaviour reflects the identi'
fications we have. This commitment to the known,
this identification with the known, is the content
of bondage. It is the self'created prison and no one
else is going to break it open for me. It is an in'
visible bondage that I have created; the frontiers
and boundaries in which I am imprisoned. I was
saying that if one really sees that everything that
mind has put together, and thought has construct'
ed, is irrelevant to discovering the meaning of life
and resolving the conflict and contradictions within
oneself, this understcinding does result in a state of
non'identification which is the content of freedom.
It is hberation.
For thousands of years this state of freedom has
been shrouded in mystery, as if it had been the
privilege of some chosen few. A s if it is something
mystical. Let me assure you that there is nothing
mysterious about freedom. It is as simple as a blade
of grass, dancing with the breeze. It is as simple
as a bud blossoming into a flower. Understanding
of the limitations of human psyche creates a state
of non'commitment which is humility. Let me go
into this issue in a different way. The state of non'
commitment, the state of non'identification culmi'
nates into silence. Silence, not as an absence of
activity; silence, not as something forced upon the

30
mind; but the spontaneous cessation of activity on
the part of the mind. A n d it results immediately,
mind you. There is no time'lag between under'
standing and its translation into actual hfe.
It is again a myth that you understand first and
then you have to approximate your hfe to that
understanding. It is one of the gravest illusions
that the human mind has cherished to justify its
laziness. Laziness and sluggishness are like leprosy.
It goes on spreading all over your being. Sluggish'
ness of the body and the mind, results in a habit
of postponement. And that postponement is
theorized, rationalized, given justifications to,
. . . oh, you know the misery of all that!
I was trying to communicate to you ' and this
verbal communication is extremely difficult' I was
trying to say that understanding of the hmitations
of your psyche, the conditioned nature of the
psyche, results in a spontaneous cessation of mental
action.
Shall we take an example? I get up in the morning
and I see my wife, I see my husband, my child. If
I have realized that I cannot understand my
husband, or wife, or child through the mind, if I
have understood that as long as I look at my
husband or wife through the mind, I am looking
at the image that my mind has created about my
husband. I look at him through the screen of my
judgment, of the prejudices and likes or dislikes of
the mind, the standards and values of the mind. So

31
I am really not looking at him, I am trying to
project myself on my husband or wife, and in as
much as and as long as the other person allows the
imposition and the projection. I say: 'Ah, I love him
and he loves me\ And if he resists that projection,
we say there is tension between him and me. So
if I realize that as long as I look at the other person
through the mind, I am not looking at him at all,
then in that moment of awareness awakens
humility and you look at your wife, your husband,
your child through humihty; humility which is
silence. Through the emptiness of that mind you
look at him. Not vacantness, mind you. Emptiness
is not vacantness. Emptiness is not blankness.
Those are negative things.
The moment mind is silent, the whole being be¬
comes active. So you look at him or her from that
totality. Silence is the operation of the totahty of
your being. A n d you will find a new person. T r y
it some time. You will find a new person who has
been with you in the house, cooking for you or
earning money for you. There will be a freshness
in your very gaze; freshness in your look and
freshness around the person who has been with
you; and you will say, 'By Jove, I have never seen
that person'.
W e are so self'centred, that our perceptions are
self'centred perceptions. A n d a self'centred person
can never look at anything in hfe, a self'centred
person cannot get related with other human beings.

32
He is so busy with his own self, his ego, his likes,
his dislikes, his thoughts, his emotions. He likes
the world, only if the world allows him to project
them on it. Most of us hve that way. W e create
screens of resistance; and adjustment of mutual
resistances is called relationship. That is the stuff
of human relationships. I adjust some of my pre'
judices and preferences to go with yours and you
adjust with mine and that we call a family. That
we call friendship. That is why the speaker said
yesterday that human beings are yet to be born.
It is only fragments that have emerged through the
human animal who has inhabited the globe. A n d
the fragments are very charming sometimes, but
the harmonious whole human being has yet to be
born. Then only there will be a human religion,
and then only there can be a human society.
The beginning of a new Hfe, a fresh life is nothing
Utopian. It is possible, it does take place. The
silence of mind which is humihty, gives you a new
dimension of living. You will agree with me that
we are existing and not hving. Moments of peace
and harmony are rare. Moments unpolluted by
the touch of mind, moments uncontaminated by
the touch of emotion and thought are rare. Getting
related to one another in humility, in the state of
non'Commitment, non'identification, is the medita'
tive way of life.

Then, when I look at a person, there is no motive

behind it. Motiveless state of consciousness is love.

33
is it not? The meditative way of hfe blossoms into
love and affection. It is an experimental science;
one has to experiment with it; not only hearing
words or reading books, but actually experimenting
every moment of life. In the silence of mental
activity love begins to operate in the totality of
your being. You are related to others without
motives.
W e do not know that state tcday. Every word
of our's has some motive behind it. Every move'
ment is motivated by something which we are
seeking, which we want. So action for us, is a
movement born of a motive. You will see with me,
that it is no action. A n y movement bom of a
motive, is a reaction to the motive; it is not action.
So we do not know what action is. Movement bom
of a motive is a reaction to the motive and there'
fore it is no movement at all. It is going round the
motive, going round the ego. Some have a small
periphery to go round and others have a bigger.
Extension of the periphery does not give you
freedom from the centre of the ego. And what we
are concerned with, is the excentration of
consciousness, ehminating of the centre, the ego,
which creates all the mischief.
W e are exploring a dimension of life where there
is a movement without a centre. In the silence of
mental action, in the silence of mental activity,
there is no centre. See the beauty of it! The move
ment of love is a movement without a centre. The

34
centre may be poor or the centre may be rich.
A person may be cultivated, a refined, cultured
person who has a very rich psyche and there may
be people who have had no education. So their
centre is not enriched. But both work through the
centre, from the centre. The meditative way is a
movement without a centre and without a
motive.
How does it come about? One can set about it if
one wants to. If one is really hungry to get free
from the state of boredom, the state of repetitive,
mechanistic action, then it is possible. If there is
a sense of urgency about it, then it is possible.
When you have pain in your tooth, when you
have a headache, you do not sit and rationahze
about it; you are not satisfied with theories given
unto you; there is an urgency to do something and
get free from the pain. The sense of urgency,
creating a state of non'identification, can lead one
to this movement of silence.
It is easy to feel a state of silence by retiring to the
Himalayas to some monastery; running away from
situations that create tensions; withdrawing into
inhibitions and reservations; or withdrawing into
aggressions and violence. Violence is also with'
drawal, withdrawal from the problems. Whether
you become aggressive, or you shp into depression,
the quahty of the mind is just the same. Fear
denied, becomes aggression. Fear yielded to, be'
comes what you call retirement. By silence we do

35
not imply retiring from the situation. W e have got
to hve in this mad world ' this sick world around
us. W e have to hve in this world wherever we
may be.
T o live in silence without slipping into any network
of escapes, given to us by rehgions all the world
over, becomes possible, when we reahze that move'
ment of silence is a dynamic movement. How does
one set about it?
Whatever is to be done, is to be done by the person
himself. No one is going to do it for him. So, how
does he set about it? He sets about it by learning
to observe. You know, what observation means?
Observation is looking without judging. A n d what
does the person do, if the judgment springs up?
W e do not know how to look. W e see things, but
we do not know how to look at things. W e hear
words, but we do not know how to listen to them.
The moment we try to observe, we begin to intrc
spect, we begin to compare. Let us put it in simpler
words. The moment I look at a thing, my mind has
already recognized it and given it a name. The
name is associated with thoughts and feelings. So
the moment of looking at a thing, is the moment of
either liking it or not liking it. The moment of
looking at it, becomes the moment of choosing.
A n observation is choiceless attention. W e have to
learn it. Our process of observation has become
so comphcated that we do not know how to look
at a thing in a simple way. W e have been trained

36
and educated in such a way that the very moment
of observation becomes the moment of choice,
acceptance or rejection. Before you are aware of
the totahty, you have already discarded the thing
or accepted the thing and you proceed. So the
real communion does not take place. The real
communion with anything in life does not take
place. W e pass on from actions halfheartedly
done, from moments halfheartedly Hved, and from
persons fragmentarily met. The residue of every
such half'hved moment and halfheartedly done
action is stored in the subconscious. The sub'
conscious goes on becoming heavier and heavier,
and gets projected into dreams at night. Distraction
during the day and dreaming at night, becomes the
stuff of our hves.
A n d you know, a person who has to carry heavy
burden, becomes easily irritated. A person who has
to carry a burden which he cannot stand, is liable
to get annoyed and become short'tempered. W e are
carrying the invisible burden in our subconscious.
W e are never free for a moment to Hve; to move
spontaneously, with ease and grace. W e are not
free. W e are floating on the momentum of our
subconscious. That is not hving, obviously.
So we were saying that one has to learn how to
observe. Can we look at something without liking
or dishking it? Not getting dazed about it? Not
being stupefied by it? I am not talking about a
stupid gaze at a tree or a flower, or getting identi'

37
fied with it and saying, *I am united with that
tree'. No, not that nonsense. Unity, the sense of
unity, is a byproduct of understanding. It does not
result from a conscious effort of the will. Every
experience of unity of hfe, consciously stimulated,
is in reality no unity at all. When one starts
spending some time in silence, learning to observe,
without the sight getting coloured by preferences
and prejudices, one will see how there is relaxation
in the totality of one's being.
To'day we look mechanically. W e know what
beauty is; we have standards of beauty. W e know
what good is, what bad is, we know what sin is,
what virtue is. W e have been taught all that. So
you look from what you have known, through your
conditioning. Whereas the movement of silence,
the movement of meditation, removes the glasses
of conditioning from your eyes. Then the world
is neither green, nor yellow, nor black nor brown.
You will reahze that you had never seen that world
before.
Meditation is de'hypnotizing yourself; meditation
is removing the glasses of all conditioning, that
mind has created. Meditation is unlearning what
we have learned. When your hke or dislike gets
mixed up with your perception, you look at that
movement of the known. I am working in an office
and the boss says something or my colleague says
something to me. Before the words are understood,
my image of the boss or of the colleague has come

38
between him and me. The reaction to the words,
has also come up, before I can respond. Can we
observe the phenomenon that the external world
is evoking the momentum of the known in me, and
that I float with that momentum and call it living,
action or movement? When one begins to see this
fact, one allows the momentum to come up, but
one does not allow it to victimize oneself, one does
not allow it to regulate or shape one's responses.
Learning to observe, awakens in you, a new power
of looking at your own reactions, without getting
sentimentally involved in them; without getting
attached to them, without getting identified with
them.
You cannot stop the momentum of the known.
You cannot suppress it. But this humility creates a
new dimension of life. You are looking at the boss;
you are listening to him, and you hsten to the
momentum of the known coming up within you,
hke a tide, breaking on the shores of an ocean.
And the moment you see simultaneously, the boss,
the colleague, their behaviour and your reactions,
in one glance, in one moment, your consciousness
has risen to a level which is totally different from
the previous level. This take'off from one level of
consciousness to the other, is a fact. W e are not
talking about theories.
There is not only space between the external world
and yourself, but space between your own reactions
and yourself. A n d then you say, 'Goodness me, up

39
till now, I used to be those reactions. I used to act,
through them, because of them, on their mO'
mentum. I used to call it hfe and experience'. You
reahze that. And then the response to the situation
is from a totally different plane of consciousness.
Without getting stuck up in the subjective or the
objective, you look at both of them. That is the
scientific way, the sane, the healthy way. You do
the needful, not out of your reactions; not out of
anger, jealousy, bitterness, indifference or lust.
You do not act out of them. You see them working
in you. You cannot wipe them out from your
blood. They are there. When you look at them,
they get exposed to your attention. One starts with
learning observation and then one lives obser'
vation.
Oh, the beauty of hving in a state of non'identifi'
cation and non'commitment! The beauty of it! The
freedom in it! The spontaneity and the grace in it, is
something which one has to discover for oneself.
When you expose your subconscious to the light
of awareness, to the light of silence, such exposure
weakens the subconscious. People in European
countries know it very well, what happens to your
clothes, when you air them and expose them to
sunhght. Don't you? Let the subconscious be aired
and bathed in the sunshine of silence and awareness.
See what happens to it. Then the subconscious and
the unconscious and their momentum become as
trivial, as this petty Httle conscious mind. Then it

40
does not bother you. Exposed to the hght of silence,
it loses its hold upon you. The culprit is not the
subconscious; the culprit is one's identification
with the subconscious. The culprit is not your
mind, your thoughts, your emotions. The culprit
is the habit of identifying yourself with them; com'
mitting yourself to them.
The meditative way releases new energy. While
doing one's work and being related with others
through the silence, the individual emerges into a
human being. W e are tcday individuals, Ameri'
cans, Indians, Dutch, Christians, Hindus; we
are committed. This committed and conditioned
psyche is not going to move. Meditation is the
movement of the totahty which begins to operate
in the silence of the psyche. When you do not
choose, when you do not have a motive, when you
do not give in, to the momentum of the sub'
conscious, every pore of your being becomes the
centre of inteUigence. A tremendous force of
intelhgence starts operating through it. Total
awareness to every movement of hfe, is really
nothing else but a kind of intelligence. It should
not be confused with intellect. Perception out of
that awareness has a totally different quahty.
I know that however much I may try to describe
how the silence operates, I will not do justice to
that state. If I have brought it to your notice that
spontaneous cessation of mental action activates
the total being and a new kind of energy is released,

41
that a new kind of movement takes place, then all
your kindness in coming here and participating
with me in this inquiry, has been fruitful.
If I have brought it to your notice that the medi'
tative way is the way of freedom, freedom from
your own mind, freedom from the slavery of the
subconscious, then your coming here has been
worth while.
If I have in these two talks removed the atmosphere
of mysticism and mystery, in which the phenome'
non of hberation has been enveloped all over the
world; if I have brought it to your notice that it is
a simple truth of hfe which can be discovered by
anyone and everyone, if he wants to; if I have
brought it to your notice that understanding is
action, there is no time-lag between the two, that
non'emotional, non'intellectual understanding of a
fact itself is action, then your kindness has not been
wasted.
I used to say that understanding has a tremendous
dynamic power and that it results in action.
Coming back to you after two years, I say tO'day
that understanding itself is total action. You know,
one grows with hfe, one discovers new nuances
and subtleties of hfe. I am sharing with you what
I have discovered. Understanding is action. Under'
standing is transformation.
Listening with your whole being does something
to your totality. If you are not hearing words and
getting stimulated by them or judging them, if you

42
really listen, whether it is a note from a cuckoo
or the words of your child, this state of non'
commitment arises in you. If I have brought this
to your attention, then your coming here has not
been wasted.
The state of hving in meditation or Hving the
meditative way, is moving in freedom. Meditation is
a way of hfe; a total way of hfe. W e cannot have
compromises with the meditative way of Hfe.
Either you hve that way, or you do not hve that
way. This meditative way of hfe is the way of
tender care and affection. What the world lacks
tO'day is love and affection.
Friends, you know the tremendous loneliness in
which everyone is living! You may have three
meals a day, a car, a good house, a so'called family
around you, and the sccalled friends aroimd you,
but when you are with yourself, if you are at all
with yourself, even for a few minutes, you will see
this sickness of lonehness. One feels lonely. A n d
whether one is working in an office or working at
home, one feels this boredom of repetitive action
and the loneliness of hfe. Life as it is lived to'day
is meaningless. One gets tired, and one drags
oneself day after day through the repetitive process
which is called Hving.
Freedom from your own mind, removes the sense
of loneliness. You may be alone, you may be in
sohtude. But you are not lonely. W e are lonely
tO'day, even when we are in crowds. W e are

43
lonely to'day though we are with famihes. W e are
lonely, though we may belong to some church,
some sect, some rehgion, some brotherhood or some
organization. Inside we are lonely. A n d it is only
the fear of death which keeps us going.
But once the mind is silent, and one learns the art
of hving in freedom from the conditioned psyche,
one has affection for everything one comes across.
Melting away of the ego, is arriving at Love. Ego is
not destroyed. The melting of ego is the creation
of love. It gets transformed into love. Then every
movement of yours, becomes an expression of love
and friendship.
The meditative way of Ufe transforms the indi'
viduals into normal, unlabelled, uncommitted
human beings, who have love and care, tenderness
and affection for one another. Then only we can
hope' and it is the only hope for the world' for a
human society, based on freedom and equahty.
Not till then.

44
2 Questions and answers
Questions on Meditation in this section have been
selected from various meetings in different years
and compiled together for the benefit of the study.
Questions and answers

Question: What is a discussion?

Vimala: Discussion is a participative communi'

cation. A l l those who attend the meeting partici'
pate in the verbal communication. Listening is also
a kind of participation. But discussion is articu'
late participation.
Once the question is verbally expressed then it is
given unto every one of us. W e take it up and
start to enquire into it.
Such a discussion presupposes that we discuss
problems pertaining to hfe. Not theoretical and
academic questions. There should be no borrowed
questions. Borrowed questions and problems do not
enable a mind to enquire. So we should utilize the
time at our disposal in discussing problems of
which we have first'hand personal experience.
Personal experience of a problem is half way to
the solution thereof. If the problem is second'hand,
aU the charm of enquiry and the joy of discovery
is lost. Let us thus begin this joint enquiry by
verbahzing problems which we experience in our
daily hfe.

47
^•uestion: Why is it so difficult to he silent when
you are sitting with many people?

Vimala: W e have tried to formulate the problems.

Let us now begin the discussion thereof. It is
generally experienced by most of you that when
you are with a group of people you find it difficult
to concentrate. W h y is it so? The difficulty could
have a dual aspect. Objective and subjective.
Objectively every person is living his particular
life in a particular way. He has his pecuhar inter'
ests; particular problems and his special confhcts;
likes, dislikes and his special preferences and
prejudices. Every person carries all these with him,
wherever he goes. He carries his psychological
climate with him everywhere. If you are a very
weak'minded person, if you are hyper sensitive,
you might find it difficult to concentrate when
there are a number of people around you. Because
you are surrounded by numberless vibrations of
thought, emotions and feelings. It is not only your
words which create an atmosphere. Mere presence
is sufficient: presence of a bird; of an animal; of
a human being; all this results in the creation of
an atmosphere. Hypersensitivity thus results in an
impediment to concentration. A weak mind cannot
resist a variety of vibrations. Such a person gets
either excited or depressed by them. This is the
objective factor.
Now subjectively, what do we mean by concen'

48
tration? It is, to me, focusing your total attention
on some specific point; you withdraw your energy
from everything and focus it on a point determined
by you. The vibrations of the presence of people
distract your mind. You cannot focus your energy
because you cannot withdraw. Perhaps you get
distracted because your physical organism is not
coordinated to your psychological organism. They
do not function in harmony. You know, conceu'
tration is a technique. But it presupposes that you
have a right kind of relationship with your diet;
with your sleep; with your nervous and muscular
system. When biological and psychological
organism are correctly tuned in, you can easily
focus your total energy on any point, at any time.
You may be moving among huge gatherings and
yet you can withdraw within a fraction of a
second. It is just a question of practice. Anyone
can develop it. Anyone can cultivate it. You may
do it by learning Hatha Yoga or by any other
method. Technicians and scientists have to cultivate
this capacity. There is nothing mysterious about it.

Question: Should we consider meditation a l^ind

of disciplining arrived at by concentration?

Vimala: Do you not regard meditation as a kind of

disciphne arrived at by concentration? That is the

49
 question? What is a disciphne? What is a disciphne
and why does disciphne become necessary? Con'
centration is a kind of mental discipline. I choose
a point to focus all my energy. I withdraw my
energy from the rest of the life, the rest of the
world, and 1 focus it on a chosen point, a chosen
idea, a chosen picture, a chosen principle, a chosen
value, whatever it may be. Now, concentration
through partial withdrawal and partial focusing
of energy, is an action born out of conflict. If there
were no conflict in the mind, if the mind were
not distracted, if all the energy could get focused
naturally, easily and totally, then concentration
would not be necessary. Concentration does imply
distraction does it not? And when we say we
practir>e concentration as a discipline, what are we
doingV The mind does not want to, or does not get
focused on that point, the picture, the guru, the
master, the value whatever it is, the mind tries to
run away. I catch hold of the mind and bring it
back. A n d by some force keep it there. That is
what we mean by discipline. Discipline becomes
necessary when there is a conflict. Discipline
becomes necessary when there is distraction,
contradiction. Please, I am not referring to the
necessity of disciphne in education, in schools. W e
wiU have to help the children to disciphne their
bodies, to make them understand: how much sleep
they may need, what kind of food they should eat.
W e will have to help them to see it till they grow

50
up. Not that we have grown up, but I mean
we will have to help them. So, I am not referring
to that part of disciphne. It will be necessary to
the minimum, with the content of the children we
will do that. But otherwise in the hfe of grown up
persons, lives of adult persons, disciphne becomes
forcing something upon the mind, imposing it.
Not that society wants to impose it, but I have
decided that I will impose it upon myself. The
necessity of imposing something is felt only when
I do not understand why the mind wants to run
away. Instead of trying to discipline the mind,
bring it back forcibly and try to focus it on a point,
why not be more friendly with the mind, and find
out what it wants, why it wants, where are the
roots of the urges of the mind? You know con'
centration, disciphne, have been the age old way
trodden by thousands and thousands. When I
question the validity of discipline, concentration,
etc. I am not questioning their integrity, the
seekers, who were born through those centuries,'
I am not trying to criticize them. But being a
rehgious person, I would hke to question the
vahdity of everything, and discover the meaning
of everything for myself. That is the essence of
rehgion, which is humility. Not to accept anything
unless you understand the meaning thereof
personally in your life. If you accept without
understanding, you will be imposing upon the
mind. A n d then you are neither true to the mind.

51
nor true to the meaning. So, the essence of rehgion
which is humihty, hes in uncovering the meaning
of hfe, uncovering the meaning of every moment,
learning the meaning of hfe for ourselves. A n d
therefore I say 'why should discipline be necessary
if we are friendly with our mind?' Understanding
of the mind, the nature of the urges of the mind,
the roots of those urges, why not try to find it out?
Perhaps if we are friendly with the mind, if we
watch the mind, if we understand the mind, let it
wander, let it roam about wherever it wants, let it
exhaust its momentum by wandering, without
scolding, without praising, without condemning
the mind. If we just watch it, it might exhaust its
momentum, and arrive at the simple, innocent
silence. So, for me discipline, concentration, seem
rather unscientific ways. I would prefer under'
standing the mind, rather than disciphning the
mind. That understanding might create its own
discipline, that is different.
A l l inclusive attention, in which I am aware
of the stimulus in the objective way that I am
aware of the sensation carried to the brain
cells; I am aware of the brain cells getting tickled
and stimulated, trying to interpret and translate
the sensation according to its conditioning, I am
aware of the nature of my reactions, how I am
responding to that. This awareness of the so'called
outward and the inward movements of life, that is
meditation. The simultaneous awareness of the

51
total movement. If I am aware of the nature of
my reactions, and movement of my reactions,
naturally that awareness will result in freedom
from the reaction. I cannot stop the reaction,
because the reactions have been rooted in the sub
conscious, in the unconscious. I cannot prevent,
I cannot renounce, I cannot check them. But if
I am aware, simultaneously of the objective chal'
lenge, the subjective reactions and the causes of
those reactions, then it results in freedom. Then
the momentum of reaction wil not carry me over
with it, but I will be ahead of the reactions; I will
not be a victim of my reaction, but I will see then
as I see the objective challenge. That for me is
meditation. A l l inclusive attention while moving
in life. Meditation does not involve any mental
activity at all. W e have never experimented with
it, and so we think it will be very difficult.

Question: W e have discussed what concentration

is and we have gone into what meditation is. Is it
not possible that concentration could culminate
into meditation?

Vimala: W e have said that concentration and

meditation are entirely two different things. Is it
not possible that the one leads to, or culminates
into the other? It seems to me that concentration

53
is a capacity of the mind which can be developed
with the cooperation of the body. You do need
a very strong and sharp nervous system to practice
concentration. But it is all the same a capacity of
the mind. Development of this capacity leads to the
awakening of many hidden powers of the mind.
They are called occult powers. You hardly come
across a person who has entered a state of medi'
tation as a result of concentration. You on the
other hand come across many whose hidden and
potential mental powers have been activised
through the practice of concentration. For example
such persons are able to read the unverbahzed
thought and emotions of other people. They have
the powers of clairvoyance and clairaudience. So
you see, concentration culminates into the
awakening of occult powers.
Meditation on the other hand begins where the
realm of duality ends. It is a state of awareness in
which there is no experiencer to take any experi'
ence.
Meditation is not a capacity of the mind. O n the
other hand total silence of the mind opens the door
to meditation. The mind is functioning in con'
centration. If the conscious mind is not working
the stimulated subconscious or the unconscious is
operating. The ego may not operate. It may become
quiet in the process of focusing all your energy on
one point. But the powers aroused by the process
have their innate momentum and they begin to

U
operate. You are carrying within you all the
mental powers developed by the total human race.
They are lying dormant in each one of you. A n d
when you practice concentration scientifically these
powers begin to manifest themselves without your
conscious effort or choice.
You may enter a state of trance through the
practice of concentration. But a state of trance
is not a state of meditation. A state of trance, a
state of having visions and extraordinary experi'
ences indicates that there is someone to experience
it. A s long as there is a possibility of an experi'
ence, you are nowhere near meditation. In the
state of meditation there is no experiencer. The
total energy gathers itself into an indivisible whole
and moves in that new dimension of totality. Look
friends, does anyone know what happens in a state
of love? Does not love defy verbalization? In the
same way that which takes place in meditation
defies description.
Concentration is like administering a drug unto
yourself. You can plunge into a state of intoxi'
cation and trance, with the help of chemicals and
drugs. Visions are thrown up in that artificially
stimulated state. Memories are brought to hfe in
that state of intoxication. Moreover the process of
concentration has a beginning and an end in time.
Where as once the state of meditation dawns upon
you it has no end. It is there. It is there vibrating
within you. It moves and not you. It takes away

55
your fragmentary existence and makes you whole.
You then act out of that totality. The state of
awareness which is meditation enables you to act
as a total human being. Then energy is not divided
into memory and response; into thought and
emotion. The whole being is suffused with that
total undivided energy. So in the state of medi'
tation you hve in that totahty of energy as the fish
hve in water.
It is not permanent m the sense of being static. It
is every moment anew. It is dynamic. It seems to
mc, thus, that concentration and meditation are
diametrically opposed to each other. Shall we
proceed now to the next question? Does anyone
want to say or suggest anything pertaining to
meditation?

Question: Concentration and meditation are

equally necessary. Are they not?

Vimala: Meditation is not a necessity of life. It is

life. It is maturity. You know we are not mature
human beings. W e are fragmented. W e try to
patch up pieces in the name of ethics, religion and
spirituality. W e try to give a semblance of totality
to our fragmented lives. But actually we are torn
within. The speaker says that totahty is maturity
and maturity is hfe. The man of this century is

56
faced with the challenge of maturity. He is con'
fronted with the challenge of a radical psychologi'
cal transformation, through which he will have to
go. Man will have to go through a psychological
mutation and emerge out of it into a mature total
human being worth the name.
Though biologically we have emerged out of the
animal, we are carrying within us the hang'over of
animahstic tendencies, instincts and passions. U n '
less we are completely free from these, we are not
human beings, though we may have attained the
form of a human being. W e are immature. So the
speaker says that meditation is life. You cannot
really hve unless you are in the state of medi'
tation.
A s regards concentration, it is a necessity of life.
It is something very personal. Those who live
superficially; whose relationships have no depth at
all, may not regard concentration a necessity.
Those who are interested in the study of the mind;
in understanding the content of the unconscious as
well as resolving the tension between the conscious
and the unconscious may find the capacity to
concentrate, a great help. It is up to you to use
it as a help. But I would like to warn you. One has
got to be extremely cautious while deahng with this
capacity of concentration. It might bring you face
to face with all that is hidden in the subconscious
and the unconscious. That encounter might either
frighten you or lead you to depressive psychosis. It

57
could even stimulate the guilt conscience. One may
get neurotic. You cannot anticipate and calculate
the contents of the unconscious. So it is really a
very dangerous game.

Question : Can discussion he a state of meditation?

Can the act of listening he the state of meditation?

Vimala: The act of Hstening being a total action

is meditation. But this joint and participative
process of discussion will become meditation only
when each participant is ruthlessly honest and
mercilessly earnest about it. When no participant
wants to argue, to convince, to justify or to defend
anything and anyone including himself, then it
could become a total action. In other words
participants should have no motive for conducting
a discussion. A discussion should be a free sharing.
It should be an occasion for learning. Then the very
act of listening, which is learning, opens the state
of awareness. Without any effort on your part,
you then are moving in the silence of mind. Silence
of mind is the state of totahty of energy. There
being no motive, the total energy has no inward or
outward direction in which it could move. The
movement of totahty is always beyond motive
which is direction. A n d meditation is that tre'
mendous movement of totahty. When you discuss

58
on that level, the very depth and intensity of it
exhausts you. It is not easy to have such a dis'
cussion. You need strong nervous system and a
clear brain to participate in the act of a genuine
discussion.
W e are used to operate fragmentarily. T o hsten is
to act totally. Very few persons can stand the
intensity of that total operation.

Question: One huxlds up a defence^mechanism

around oneself. When one is faced with a new
situation the defence'tnechanism starts operating
before you can respond. It interprets and hloc\s
your response. How does one overcome this
difficulty?

Vimala: Everyone builds around himself protective

walls; a psychological structure which is called a
defence'mechanism. Ideas, thoughts, emotions,
patterns of reactions, all these are organic parts
of that defence'mechanism. The psychologists say
that when this mechanism is shattered the mind
is unhinged, it is unbalanced. Such a person is
regarded by society as a mentally sick person.
Now education teaches you how to build a strong
and impenetrable defence. Schools and colleges,
rehgions and cultures teach you precisely how to
build a psychological defence'Structure. You are
taught to construct a psychological enclosure and

59
a person who becomes an expert in that art is
called an educated person; a cultured person. The
more refined your defence-mechanism gets the
more respectable you become in society. Education
is meant for enabling you to build up a strong
defence-mechanism. Everyone of us has done it
consciously as well as unconsciously. From
childhood we build it up. Some patterns are
absorbed unconsciously. Some are cultivated
systematically. And all these culminate into a
strong enclosure.
Now our friend suggests that when you are placed
in an entirely unfamihar situation, that defence'
mechanism operates before you get an opportunity
to respond. What can one do about it? That is
her problem. Look friends, this so called defence-
mechanism is the I, the self, the ego. You do not
possess the mechanism. You have become it. Please
observe the movement within you and you will
discover this simple fact. You have identified your-
self with the I. So your I is the defence-mechanism.
Through untold centuries Man has been building
it up and you contain within your mind the residue
of the total human effort and experience. You thus
do not have the mechanism. You are it.
If you are not different from the mechanism why
do you say that it does not allow you to operate?
There can be two reasons. The first could be
rehgious and spiritual instructions you have
received from your prophets and teachers. They

60
have been repeating ad nauseam that there is an
immortal entity within you. They call it the soul,
the atman and so on. A l l religious sects, the world
over except perhaps the Buddhists and the Jains
talk of an immortal entity. I call them sects because
the true religion is yet to be born. A rehgion in
which the totality of energy will be moving sponta'
neously. Such a religion has yet to dawn upon this
earth. You may not make a study of theology but
the churches, the temples, the mosques, their
rituals, ceremonies and congregations around you
cannot be avoided by you. So without your
knowing a numberless theories get sunk deep into
you. The vague awareness of these creates a
duality. You separate yourself from the I and
argue that it does not allow you to operate. The
problem thus is not a problem at all: It is a reaction
to the assumption of reality.
Secondly an earnest seeker after truth may become
aware of the presence of a witness within him.
That awareness could compel one to ask such a
question. Please do not translate that word witness
into something metaphysical. The word witness is
used by the speaker to indicate that the totality
of the consciousness is not conditioned by the
society and its so called education, culture, rehgion,
so on and so forth. The awareness of an un'
conditioned consciousness is not based on any
theory or scriptures. It is a first'hand experience
of alert and sensitive enquirers. I do take the

61
liberty of conducting an enquiry on the basis of
this universal experience rather than on the first
academic presumption. Theories are speculative.
W e are not here to debate them. W e are here to
discuss facts of hfe.
Now when the person becomes aware that all his
likes and dislikes, preferences and prejudices, his
thoughts, ideas, emotions and sentiments are the
result of his conditioning, what happens to the
quahty of his life? W e are saying that a person
becomes aware of this as a fact of life. Facts cannot
be deduced from theories. They are not derived
from the teachings of some scriptures. W e are
referring to a direct awareness which penetrates
through all the layers of one's being. When the
awareness of the anatomy of the defence'
mechanism dawns upon you: an awareness of the
tremendous momentum innately carried by the
mechanism descends upon you; when you become
aware of the irresistible force contained in the
whole defence'mechanism which is the I , that
awareness awakens a new dimension of humihty
which you have not known before. I am not talking
of humihty which you cultivate against vanity.
I am not talking of that quality of mind which is
cultivated through some method. It is no humihty
at all. A l l the virtues cultivated by society are
nothing but capacities of the mind. A n d a capacity
is but a resistance. By humihty the speaker imphes
an absolutely unfamihar dimension of conscious'

62
ness. It is the dimension of silence. So when you
are faced with an utterly new challenge you are
silent. Instead of reacting on the basis of your
conditioning you remain silent. You want to
understand the challenge. You want to learn. A n d
one learns only when one is free to do so. When
you become aware that unless you are silent, you
will be carried over by the tide of the unconscious
which has a terrific momentum, you get immedi'
ately free of the whole defence'mechanism. The
trouble with us is, we know too much about life.
W e have no time to look simply at hfe. W e are
busy reacting according to our patterns of up'
bringing and accumulating new patterns of re'
spending. W e are not free to look and learn.
The momentum of the unconscious is not the real
culprit. Your identification with the unconscious
is the real culprit. Unless you accept the authority
of your accumulated knowledge and experience,
you would never say that you know. Humihty
is innocence. Learning is the spontaneous move
ment of innocence. Innocence is not ignorance.
It is maturity. So humihty which is innocence
becomes the stuff of your whole being.

63
Question: How to accelerate the movement of the
conscious mind against that of the unconscious?

Vimala: Now is not this question a speculative one?

Is it not based on supposition that understanding
is one thing and the movement of understanding
is an independent phenomenon? Unless you
presume that understanding and action are two
different phenomena you would not raise that
question. You raise it because you have not
experienced the dynamism of understanding.
Understanding of a fact is an extremely explosive
thing. When you say, you understand something,
understanding is an intellectual activity for you.
You grasp an idea or a thought through the
intellect and store it in in your memory. But under¬
standing of a fact is not at all an intellectual activity.
It is not anti-intellectual but it is not a mental
activity at all. It is a total operation. Understanding
is unrelated to the T and its mechanism. T which
is nothing but the crystallized knowledge and
experience of the whole human race is really the
past that we are carrying within us. The past
cannot understand the present. It may interpret it.
But interpretation is negation of understanding.
Interpretation is imposing the past upon the
present. Projecting and imposing the past upon the
present block perception. Simple perception is a
total act. Interpretation is a partial and fragmen-
tary activity. Life begins anew when you become

64
aware that until then your hfe was wasted in
living mechanically. It was an indulgence in
mechanistic action. Freedom from mechanistic
action is the beginning of a new hfe. You cannot
imagine that state of being in which authority of
every manner is non-existent. You have no idea
how the mind is emptied of the total past and how
in that space something entirely new is bom. Y o u
cannot speculate how a free movement of
consciousness releases self'generating energy.
So the moment you are aware of the terrific
momentum of the unconscious, there is space
within you. Then you can look; watch; observe.
The space creates a distance between the defence
mechanism and yourself. Naturally when you are
confronted with an entirely new challenge you
observe the challenge as well as the reactions of
the defenccmechanism. You look at them simul'
taneously. What happens when you look at them?
You are not responding according to your con'
ditioning. The conditioning is rendered absolutely
ineffective by your total act of observation. When
you discover freedom from the momentum of the
unconscious, in your daily relationships, there is
a new quahty of ever'freshness in your hfe. The
discovery of freedom, not as a theory or an idea,
but as a fact of hfe does not need time. Under'
standing is always immediate. You can leave this
room with a freshness of humility. A humihty
which will enable you to walk through joy and

65
sorrow, pain and pleasure without getting stuck
up in either of them. You cannot avoid the duahty
of time and space. But humihty and the freedom
flowing out of it enables you to walk through that
duahty without carrying the burden of authority
which is memory.

Siuestion: Is meditation to die before death?

Vimala: Dying to the past is another word for

meditation. Dying to that part of activity of your
consciousness which has been conditioned, through
centuries. Not the whole conscious has been con'
ditioned. If the whole consciousness had been
conditioned, if there were no dimension of
consciousness beyond the conscious and the un'
conscious, we would not be here talking and
conversing with one another. There is a part of
brain, there is a part of consciousness which is not
conditioned. Doctors will teU you. They will say
that the front lobe of the human brain is not yet
discovered. A l l the discoveries, about even the
physical organism of brain are limited to the hind
portion of the brain, and they do not know what
is there in this front portion. It is like a virgin land,
and with all the methods and techniques that man
has today, man has not been able to identify a n y
thing in this part of the brain. Dying to that part

66
of consciousness which has been conditioned,
thereby meaning arriving at a spontaneous, total
silence of the conditioned consciousness, may actify
the remaining part of the consciousness. That is
what they call meditation. In meditation the total
silence of the conditioned mind opens the gate to
untapped virgin part of human consciousness. So,
I was using the word 'dying to the past', avoiding
to use the word 'meditation', because I was afraid
that the word 'meditation' might get a set of
associations in our mind. I am really finding it very
difficult. Because really, every word has some kind
of association, and as soon as I say 'meditation',
then what kind of meditation and its pattern, its
whole framework, would be evoked. A n d therefore
I said 'dying to the total past'. And dying to the
past is going through meditation, if we can use the
word, understanding clearly what we imply by it.
T o me meditation is really the total action. I said
that death could be total action, the most beautiful
action, and meditation would be the total action.
Because the total mind is silent, no rumination
of the past, no dreaming of the future, no pushing
force of a motive, no enticing force of a direction,
of an ideal. It is in the present, it is in silence, it is
in humihty, and an absolutely new quahty of
action, a new quality of movement, the movement
of the energy which is at the root of human
consciousness. That energy gets activied in the
silence of the conditioned mind. So, I call it death.

67
Question: 1 have not arrived at mutation. Can 1
bring it nearer or have I to he satisfied with the
energy 1 have at my disposal?

Vimala: By now man has seen that mutation is

unrelated to any special relationship. He has to
understand that a temporal relationship to mu'
tation is also a myth. It is a myth to say that one
could attain or achieve mutation; that one could
arrive at mutation. A s soon as you concede that
it is something to be acquired by the mind in time,
you imply that mutation is an object and your
mind is the subject who is going to acquire it or
arrive at it. A s long as you regard mutation as
something to be achieved by the mind you are a
prisoner of the defence-mechanism; you are a
victim of the mechanistic action of your con-
ditioning. Do you see my point? I am questioning
the vahdity of your approach to mutation. For all
we know you are putting a wrong question. A
wrong question cannot, obviously, lead to the right
enquiry.
It seems to me that mutation is not something
which could be attained or acquired. The mind as
it is today is not going to achieve mutation. This
petty shallow mind is never going to possess it.
Mutation is an event which takes place in the
silence of this mind. It is an explosion which takes
place in the space created by emptiness. So in the
very beginning beware of the mischief of your

68
mind which thrusts an acquisitive urge on you in
the garb of an enquiry. Moreover beware of the
mind that says it has no energy to explode.
When I say I have no energy what do I imply? It
may be that physically I am weak. Physical weak'
ness may be due to a wrong relationship with diet.
Diet and exercise do play a very important part
in releasing energy. It is vitally necessary to
discover the right relationship with your nervous
and muscular system and provide them with the
right kind of nutrition. The biological organism
should be hke a blossoming flower. Unless the
whole metabohsm is in order, you cannot have
energy obviously. So if your body is sluggish, weak
and insensitive you must find out for yourself why
it is so and put things right. It is not very difficult.
Presuming that the whole biological system is in
order and a person says he has not got sufficient
energy. What should he do then?
I would try to find out how much energy I dissipate
and waste throughout the day. Do you know how
much energy is wasted in the chattering of the
mind? Every thought consumes energy. Every
emotion consumes energy. Even when you are
physically alone and by yourself you could be
spending lots of energy through the chattering of
your mind. The chattering which consumes energy
will have to come to an end. Energy should not be
wasted in reactions. Reacting and brooding also
imply consumption of vital energy. Unwarranted

69
indulgence in thought and emotion is sheer waste of
energy. So please find out how much energy you
are wasting throughout the day. If you allow that
energy to gather itself unto itself, you will have
immeasurable more energy.

Another way of wasting energy is to act out of

tension, conflict and contradiction. When you
suppress one part of your mind and react to the
situation with another part of the mind, the energy
is divided and spent on two fronts. Inward sup'
pression or repression and outward reaction or
response imply double expenditure of your energy.
Do not they? One has to find out, moreover, how
one wastes energy in dreams. When you see
dreams, your mind is working. So let an enquirer
after truth first gather all the energy unto himself.
Let him be alert, sharp and sensitive enough, not to
waste energy through any kind of conflicts and
tensions. Then perhaps he will discover that there
is an inexhaustible source of energy within him.
Every human being is that source of energy.
W e do not know ourselves. Hence we complain
that we have no energy.

70
Sluestion: Does had thought or had feeling mmn
waste of energy?

Vimala: What is a bad thought? What is a bad

feeling? Thought is thought. The mechanism of
the mind works the same way whether you call
it a good thought or a bad thought. Energy is spent
whatever thought or feeling you indulge in. What
do you mean by 'bad' or 'evil'? I do not know
what evil is. Something may be incorrect. But
what is an evil? This is my genuine difficulty. This
is not a rhetorical question. The speaker really does
not know what evil is; what 'sin' is and the speaker
means what she says.
I know that there can be emotional or intellectual
mal'adjustment with challenges of hfe. I know that
such mal'adjustment can and does result in in'
correct or wrong relationships. For example I do
not know how to drive a car. I have therefore no
proper relationship with a car. NatiiraUy when I
try to drive it I find myself banging against a tree
or a lamp post. In the same way I am not acquaint'
ed with my biological and psychological organism.
I do not understand the nature of forces operating
in the body and the mind. Naturally there is lack
of adjustment and arrangement. The ignorance
results in wrong actions. But why must you give
them a moral odour? What is immorality? W h y
not regard it like pressing the wrong key and
giving out a wrong note? The moment you call it

71
bad or good you are a victim of duality, you add
a burden of choice to your mind. It seems to me
that all duahty is unrelated to hfe and living. Let
not self erected enclosures imprison you. Be not
afraid of hfe. Be vulnerable to it. There is a beauty
in being vulnerable. Living is being exposed to the
flow of hfe. Knowlegde and experience are re'
sistances which obstruct the free flow of conscious'
ness which is life. The more you try to protect
yourself, the more you move away from hfe. Let
not this temptation of security bewitch you, into
its trap. Be exposed to the silence of the total mind.
Move in that silence. Let every action be the
spontaneous movement of that silence. Then you
will discover the beauty of life. Then you will
discover how human relationships get transformed;
how spontaneous cooperation and friendship blos'
som in the world.

Today we do not know what friendship is; we do

not know what cooperation is. Friendship based
upon the identity of intellectual and emotional
idiosyncrasies is no friendship at all. It is an insult
to a human being if I love him for his thoughts
or talents. It means I do not love him at all; I love
my own tastes and standards. Conditional friend'
ship is an affront to human dignity.

72
Question: How can one sha\e off unessentials
from the mind and how can one get free of dudity
which dominates the mindl

Vimala: The best way to shake off the unessentials

is to understand the nature of the essentials. When
you truly understand the nature of the essentials
of hfe, the unessentials wither away. No separate
effort is warranted to 'shake them away'. Let me
assure you that understanding has its own momen'
tum, and it starts working from the very moment
understanding has taken place.
I do not understand what you imply by saying that
'duality in mind dominates'. Mind is a bundle of
feelings, emotions, sentiments, ambitions, desires,
conflicts and a hundred tensions. A s long as that
mind is moving and functioning there is going to
be an action based on choice. Choice indicates
duahty. In other words as long as there is the
illusion of time, duality is bound to flow from
everything that the mind touches. So instead of
bothering about the duahty, try to find out if the
mind can be silent and if there is any action out'
side the compass of time and space.

73
3 Self'education
Notes for personal study

What is Meditation?

Meditation is an all'inclusive attention. It is the

movement of such total attention.

A l l relationships get revolutionized once you arrive

at the totahty of attention. Relationships are no
more related to the ego which ceases to function.
There are no more movements motivated by an
idea or thought. They have no outward or inward
direction of material or spiritual attainment. They
are as natural and effortless as your breathing.
Meditation is thus the total silence of mind in
action. Such silence imphes a tremendous intensity
and depth in which the consciousness operates. A s
long as an action springs out of the mind it is a
partial action and therefore can not be either
intense or deep. A l l mental activity is shallow and
does not need much energy. It is a passive activity
of following the groove of sensation ' inter'
pretation ' reaction.

Discriminative perception and intuitive perception

is on a shghtly deeper level, but it is still related

75
to the I'CORSciousness. It is still a refined and
subtle capacity of the I . In other words it imphes
the existence of duality. The movement of silence
is basically in non'duahty. The I'consciousness
simply does not function. Every divisive element
withers away. Total energy which is the root of
consciousness moves within itself.
The word 'moves' is employed to denote the
dynamic and creative aspect of the pure 'is'ness'.
In reahty there is no space or time in which that
energy could move. Even the concept of move'
ment is related to our present perception which is
the result of the ^consciousness functioning
through the senscorgans.

How does one begin?

One has to understand that total hfe is involved

in meditation. The physical and the psychological
are equally involved in it. Unless one is wiUing to
undergo radical changes in both fields, one should
not think of hving the meditative way.
One has to begin with scrutinizing everything that
one does in relation to his body and mind. This
investigation has to be simultaneous.
Acquaintance with one's body is the first step.
Friendship with the body is the second.
You provide the needs of the body in a friendly

76
way. But you do not pamper the body. You do
not get attached to the body. You do not allow
the body to dictate terms to you.

Diet
Correct diet imphes the right quahty and quantity
as well as the frequency of intakes.
Eating should be related to appetite. It should not
cause any excitement, or emotional disturbance.
It should be gone through peacefully and happily.
One has to be very alert to see that everything one
eats is fully digested. The body should not be
burdened with undigested food. The cleanhness
of all the internal organs is one of the most
important factors of meditation.

Physique
Persons suffering from physical troubles will find
it difficult to sustain the depth of meditation or
total awareness.
One has to be very alert to see that the nervous
and the muscular system are supple and healthy.
Rigidity means dis'ease. No part of the body
should be allowed to degenerate into rigidity. By
proper exercises one can keep every fibre of the
physical organism in health. Health is beauty.

Sleep
One has to see that one sleeps profoundly for at
least six hours at a stretch. Minimum six hours

77
sleep in summer and eight hours in winter is
necessary for a human being.
The best time to sleep is two hours before mid'
night and the hours after midnight.

Self-Education I

Meditation requires an all'round education.

Grown'up persons find it rather difficult to learn
by themselves. They find it easy to be compelled
into following certain patterns, methods or
techniques. In other words they want some authc
rity. Meditation on the other hand implies self'
education. It implies first'hand discovery of the
meaning of life. A person who wants to discover,
learns from everything and everyone, without
depending upon anything and anyone.
Self'education thus requires:
The alert sensitivity of a child.
The humihty of a research scholar, who tries
to learn and discover without imposing his suly
jective attitudes and reactions on the process of
research.
The sense of responsibility to live up to what
he learns, irrespective of the consequences. Truth
is for hving. One who tries to propagate or
organize truth, obviously steps out of the rhythm
of totahty.

78
When one is willing to educate oneself he should
find out what are priorities in his hfe. Discovering
the order of priority and alotting one's time and
energy in proportion to that order is vitally
necessary.
Generally we waste energy in unessential
secondary things. This criminal waste, leaves us
tired and troubled at the end of the day. A n
overtired and emotionally disturbed person cannot
sleep profoundly. The sacred night is wasted and
you begin the next day with a sluggish body and
a lethargic mind.
One has to see that one does not waste the precious
energy unwarrantedly. The energy that is built-in,
in childhood and youth is our capital. It should be
conserved and used with care and concern.
Energy is consumed by every movement of body,
mind and speech.
Every thought, emotion and ideation consume
vital energy. Every spoken word consumes vital
energy.
Self'education begins by watching how we are
using the energy and learning how not to waste
it through:

Excitement Self'pity
Haste Fear
Worry Gossip
Envy Attitude of judging others
Ambition

79
Self'Education II

The next step is to learn to do everything with

accuracy and precision. That is the scientific way
of action. When one does things with precision
one naturally does them in the most beautiful and
efficient way. Beauty and efficiency flow out of
accuracy. Efficient action imphes minimum energy
and time-consumption.
The art and science of action can be learnt if one
is alert and watchful.
After learning the art of accuracy, one should
focus one's attention to see that one does the
necessary things at the necessary time. Postpone
ment of action is the seed of anxiety, fear and
worry. Right action at the right moment saves a
lot of mental exertion.
The habit of postponing physical action gets
crystallized and distorts perception. The same
habit becomes a psychological attitude. Postpone'
ment of decisions, laziness in responses to situations
and other neurotic tendencies grow in the soil of
postponement. Postponement in responses leaves
a residue in the subconscious. The objective chal'
lenge degenerates into a subjective problem. That
creates tensions and conflicts. Man is mostly
reckless in youth. He thinks it a privilege to
behave impulsively and thoughtlessly in youth.
In middle age he becomes slow, sluggish and
conformist. In old age he loses constructive interest

80
in life. Thus man never really hves. He postpones
hving. He always avoids meeting the present
moment.
Meditation is meeting eternity in the present
moment. It is resolving every problem as it comes.
It is resolving every tension as it creeps in. It is
facing the challenges of life in a non'fearful
way.
Meditation is relaxation in action. Only that
person can act out of his total being, who acts in
relaxation. Tensions, fears and worries create
inhibitions. A person who hves in constant confhct
and tension starts seeking relaxation outside his
daily life. He seeks silence outside his skin. He
seeks perfection outside his daily relationships.
W e should be vigilant not to become victims of
such unholy temptations. T o penetrate through
the daily routine and relationships; to understand
them and to undergo a transformation through
that understanding is the creative way of medi'
tation.
This is why we call it Total All'inclusive Atten'
tion.

Self-Education III

It is not easy to be totally aware. It is not easy to

look at anything in a total way. W e are not used

81
to it. No one has taught us the way of effortless
awareness.
W e do not know how to hve in emptiness. Every
moment of our waking hours, is filled with egO'
centred activities. I would suggest that a person
interested in meditation spends some time every
day in complete silence. One has to begin with
abstention of physical and psychological action.
In the beginning one should try to follow the
rhythm of breathing. The support of the rhythm
can be used to divert attention from 'thought'
memoryresponse'process.'
A calmness prevails when the attention is turned
inwards. A relaxation is experienced when the
thought'process comes to an end.
The first impact of such experience of emptiness
is mostly bewildering. Every other second the mind
wants to imagine that something is happening. It
wants to feel that it is getting some experience.
The mind feels strangled when silence starts
operating on it.
One has to watch the movements of the mind
without trying to control or suppress it. One has
to go through the phase of suffocation, embarras'
ment and void. It is an unavoidable experience of
lonehness through which every one has to go once
in his hfe.

82
Self-Education JV

If one can go through the physical exercises as well

as the hour of silence in the morning, one begins
the day in the right manner. One begins the day
in a calm, peaceful and serene way.
Daily hfe is the only hfe we know. It has to be
hved sanely, healthily and richly.
Within few weeks one finds that one is able to
discharge daily routine in a peaceful way. Chal'
lenges come. Hardships impede. One responds out
of awareness.
It is necessary to point out that with the growth
of sanity, peace and poise, many latent psychic
powers begin to unfold. Occult powers begin to
manifest. Clairaudience, clairvoyance, telepathy,
heahng'touch, premonition of events, magnetism
and such other powers begin to manifest without
any conscious effort on the part of the individual.
T o get entangled in the powers and to exploit
them for any purpose whatsoever, damages every
thing. One has to observe them and let them pass
by. T o get conditioned by psychic powers will be
silly and futile.
O n the other hand, daily plunge into deep silence
may make returning to daily work rather un'
pleasant, if it is not taken in the proper way.
Let not the mind get absorbed with the silence. If
one is experiencing silence through the mind, one
is on the wrong track. It is still a partial action.

83
The realm of silence opens only when the experi'
encer ceases to be. So whenever coming back to
daily work is found difficult, one must realize that
one had not been in silence at all. One was playing
with absence of activity. Whenever one feels
dazed and exhausted after the hour of silence,
one was not in silence at all.
A spontaneous cessation of mental activity releases
an absolutely new and dynamic energy. Silence
increases the sensitivity of the total being. It re'
freshes the nervous system in an astounding way.
A s you come out totally replenished when you
have had profound and innocent sleep, so do you
come out totally renewed when you have had
ceased to function through the ego in the hour of
silence.

Self'Edtxcation V

The observation of the breathing rhythm is sug'

gested as a support to those who cannot arrive at
the spontaneous stiUness of total mind without
some support. But to depend upon the support for
a long period is undesirable and unwarranted. One
has to discover for oneself whether one is learning
self'rehance through the support or not. Simple
observation of the breathing rhythm culminates
into silence or total awareness within a few weeks.

84
Secondly the hour of silence should enable one to
hve in awareness throughout the day. In the be'
ginning one experiences a change in the quahty
of hfe as an impact of the hour of silence. Later
on that changed quality becomes a regular di'
mension of hfe. One arrives at a stage thereafter,
in which alotting an hour becomes unnecessary.
O r rather all the 24 hours of the day become the
'hour of silence'. In the new dimension of hfe one
uses mind when it is unavoidable. One does not
hve in the 'ocean of thought' anymore. One lives
in an immeasurably deep silence. One uses speech
only when one finds it inevitable. Misuse of speech
consumes as much vital force as is consumed in
the misuse of sexual force.
One eats only when it is necessary to keep the
body in health. One eats only what keeps the body
and mind in health and beauty. Misuse of the
palate is responsible for most of the physical
ailments.
One responds to situations with poise and peace.
One responds to human beings with affection and
friendship. Emotional reactions do not twist and
distort the responses anymore. The response is
rooted not in the mind but in the total being.
The family responsibihties and social commitments
are discharged easily and gracefully. They are no
more expressions of vanity or self'pity. They are
hke inhahng and exhahng breath. Natural' effort'
less and nourishing. Thus meditation is complete

8?
abandonment in every relationship. It is the
dynamic movement of total silence of the ego. It is
movement of uninhibited freedom. It is movement
of unquahfied relaxation.
Through self'education and vigilance it is possible
for a serious and earnest person to grow into the
maturity of meditation.

86